June Squibb is 94 years old, and killing it in Thelma (now streaming on Hulu), a gentle, AARP-ed spoof of action-revenge genre pictures. You certainly recognize Squibb as the scene thief in 2013’s Nebraska, which earned her a well-deserved Oscar nomination, so it’s inspiring for anyone who’s getting a little gray and hasn’t accomplished their dream yet to learn that she essentially reached the apex of her profession at age 84. Crazier still, she didn’t act in a movie until she was 60 (with role in 1990 Woody Allen film Alice), having honed her acting chops on stage for the bulk of her career. Even then, she’s only played supporting roles, so I’m delighted to share that her first star turn, Thelma, is a highly enjoyable one.
THELMA: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: You’re surely familiar with this scene: An elderly person struggling with the computers and asking a younger person for help with scrolling and emails and the like. That’s Thelma (Squibb) to her grandson Daniel (Fred Hechinger). She eventually works through it and Daniel’s patient – representative of their loving, affectionate relationship. He begs her to wear a medic-alert bracelet, and she agrees. Not that she wants to, mind you. She does it because he asked, and you get the sense she probably wouldn’t otherwise. It’s a dumb clunky ugly thing on her wrist representing her increasing lack of independence, a yucky feeling that many older people have to deal with as their bodies slow down. She’s been a widow for two years now, so she lives alone, in her own home. Daniel wants her to wear it if she should ever take a fall. She’d simply prefer to not think about falling.
Thelma goes about her days as you’d expect a 90-something woman with a mobility issue or two to do: Breakfast, some exercise on the mini elliptical, do a little cross-stitching, dink around the house, connect her hearing aids to her phone and make some calls, etc. She doesn’t drive anymore. She used to have lunch with different groups of friends, but many of them have passed away by now. There’s this widower fella who calls her and offers to take her for a ride on his new scooter, but she rolls her eyes. Then her phone rings: UNKNOWN CALLER. A young voice on the other end identifies himself as Daniel. It doesn’t quite sound like him, but he’s panicky and says he’s in trouble and she’s about to get a call from a lawyer and when she talks to the lawyer he convinces her to put a $10,000 cash retainer in an envelope and mail it to him to keep Daniel out of deep doodoo. And she goes to significant lengths to follow his instructions.
We know this is bad. Thelma just got duped by scammers who deserve to have their extremities gnawed off by ravenous eels. The truth soon becomes evident: Daniel was just at home doing the nothing that he normally does, much to the chagrin of his parents, Gail (Parker Posey) and Alan (Clark Gregg), who micro-scrutinize their aimless, recently-dumped-by-his-girlfriend 24-year-old son. Do they realize he’s showing signs of depression? I don’t think they do. And so he finds solace and unconditional love from his dear grandmother. His dear grandmother, who’s embarrassed and pissed the eff right off about being swindled.
What can Thelma do about it? The cops are no help. So she drops in on the scooter fella, Ben (Richard Roundtree of Shaft fame), and ends up puttering his two-seater scooter – it’s like a trike moped with a top speed of about 0.7 mph – all the way across town, aiming for the address where she sent the dough. I think it’s important to note that Ben sits in the rear seat while she drives. Of course, this excursion is totally unauthorized, because there’s no way her daughter Gail or Daniel or anyone would endorse this type of behavior. But Thelma wants to stand up for herself even if it means going AWOL for a while and making everybody worry. She also might really very much need to make a new friend and go on an adventure, for the sake of living right here in this very moment.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The bones of this premise are a lot like The Beekeeper, but Thelma does her own dirty work instead of getting Jason Statham to do it.
Performance Worth Watching: The chemistry between Squibb and Hechinger is tender, sweet and thoughtful, and it ends up being the beating heart of this funny little movie.
Memorable Dialogue: I like these two lines:
Thelma, upon learning that scammers mine Facebook for personal information they’ll use to swindle you: “Shouldn’t Zuckemborg (sic) be able to fix this?”
Ben supplies the meta-textual commentary to this plot when he declares, “This whole thing has been really ridiculous.”
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: One comedic point that makes this plot go: There’s a scene in which Thelma and Daniel watch a Mission: Impossible movie, and it ends up inspiring her to hop on that scooter, poot all the way across town, acquire a gun (!) and get her stolen money back. She can’t runrunrunrun like Tom Cruise, but she can channel his spirit, so the movie playfully adopts the structure and musical score of an action film, and satirizes some tropes of the genre. There’s a terrific sequence late in the movie where Ben, speaking to Thelma through their app-connected phones and hearing aids, speaks into her earpiece and helps her navigate a cluttered antique shop. I laughed my ass off.
But beneath this silliness lies Thelma’s greatest strength: An empathetic exploration of an elderly woman’s battle with loneliness, codependency and stagnation. Not that the film is a heavy-duty drama; rather, it’s a feelgood comedy that isn’t content to be simple and shallow like many other movies of its ilk. The chemistry between Roundtree – he passed in 2023, and this is his final role – and Squibb is warm and funny, and Thelma’s relationship with Daniel puts them in a gently adversarial position opposite the neurotic, high-strung Gail and Alan (Posey and Gregg stir their share of laughs despite limited screen time).
First-time writer-director Josh Margolin manages to find honest truth in the foibles of young-slacker and old-lady characters without resorting to stereotypes or too-easy jokes. Hechinger brings more substance to Daniel than you might expect; his is a subtle portrait of psychological struggle. And Squibb’s characterization is far deeper than any jokes about newfangled tech or old-folks-say-the-darnedest-things malapropisms. Such attention to detail is what makes Thelma exceptional. Sure, it subverts expectations and offers a little sly comedy at the expense of genre films. But it’s ultimately a movie about people and who they are, not what they do. This is a thoroughly funny, satisfying and subtly moving film.
Our Call: Thelma takes no shit, and we’re here for it. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
