Hollywood doesn’t make fun films like Thelma any more. But the studios know a good thing when they see it. When this nonagenarian adventure premiered at Sundance to huge applause last January, bidders came a-calling. The result is a pleasing summer sleeper hit built largely on word of mouth and an all-ages audience.
June Squibb leads a stellar cast as the plucky grandmother of the title. A fiercely independent widow, she is outraged when she falls victim to an elaborate phone hoax. “Shouldn’t Zuckenborg be able to fix this?” she asks the investigating officer.
In the aftermath, Thelma’s concerned daughter, Gail (Parker Posey), wonders if her mother should continue living alone; Thelma’s doting 24-year-old grandson, Danny (Fred Hechinger), has more faith in his grandma.
Unbowed and inspired by Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible, Thelma sets out across Los Angeles on a mobility scooter to recover her $10,000. She is joined by a reluctant Richard Roundtree, with charming echoes of the Cowardly Lion, playing Thelma’s “boring” chum Ben. It’s a wonderful last hurrah for the Shaft actor, who died last October.
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Squibb, an auteur favourite who has been acting since the 1950s, has a ball with her first action heroine in a film that musters explosions and crashes on a smaller scale. Raging against the dying of the light has seldom been so high-octane.
Writer-director Josh Margolin, making his feature debut, based the eponymous character on his grandmother. The script, accordingly, is never patronising. A late plot twist provides an additional poke in the eye for ageism.
Squibb, who is now 94, earned an Oscar nomination for her late-blooming breakthrough in the 2013 film Nebraska. She seems certain to repeat that trick next spring with this punch-the-air crowd-pleaser.
Thelma is in cinemas from Friday, July 19th
