Movie Review: Thelma & Louise (1991)

Thelma & Louise is a road movie, a fugitive movie, and a buddy movie. Callie Khouri's rich screenplay and director Ridley Scott manage to find the best qualities of all three sub-genres, and they impressively avoid most cliches. Thelma & Louise is never predictable, and it has become one of the standards by which movies in these genres are defined.

Louise (Susan Sarandon) and Thelma (Gena Davis) are best friends in Oklahoma, and both are at a dead-end in life. Louise is a waitress at a cheap diner; Thelma is a housewife being controlled and emotionally trampled by her uncaring husband Darryl. The two friends embark on a short vacation getaway in Louise's Ford Thunderbird. They stop at a roadside cowboy bar en-route, where Thelma meets and gets cozy with the womanizing Harlan. When he tries to rape the almost-drunk Thelma, Louise saves her friend then shoots and kills Harlan when he insults her. The women drive away from the scene, and from then on are fugitives wanted for murder.

Thelma and Louise head for Mexico, but Louise insists that they avoid driving through Texas, due to a dark incident in her past. Sticking to the back roads, they pick-up the drifter J.D. (Brad Pitt), who for the first time ignites Thelma's passion. Meanwhile, the police, including Detective Slocumb (Harvey Keitel) descend on Darryl's house to monitor his phone and try to trace the two women.

As the chase heats up, Thelma holds up a grocery store; the two ladies overcome an Arizona state trooper; and they repeatedly encounter and finally engage a tanker truck driven by an obscene chauvinist. But the noose gets tighter, and before they make it to the border, Thelma and Louise face a stark fork in the road.

As with all road movies, Thelma & Louise is really about the trip of self-discovery that the characters need to take. Thelma's transformational trip is dramatic: from a meek wife to a confident outlaw, Thelma finds her calling and is keen to make up for lost time in a hurry. Her trigger point is the night of passion with J.D., her sexual awakening corresponding to the start of a new, dynamic, vibrant, but likely fairly short life. Geena Davis has a lot of fun steering Thelma from the wife who does not dare tell her husband that she is leaving on a short trip, to the outlaw who stuffs a police officer in the trunk of his cruiser, but only after shooting air holes into it.

Louise goes through a more subtle, inward journey. Suppressing memories of a never-revealed trauma that occurred in Texas, what Louise refuses to talk about is the cause of the entire manic adventure. As events spiral out of control around her, Louise still refuses to confront her past: not with Thelma in the car, not with Detective Slocumb over the phone, and not with herself. She is a classic tragic hero, and her flaw colours her fate. Susan Sarandon delivers an anguished, introverted performance. With mayhem all around her, there is even more going on behind her eyes as she fails to come to terms with her scars but realizes that she is coming to terms with her life.

While each woman embarks on a separate emotional journey, they are in the car together, and the ups and downs of their relationship is the glue that holds the movie together. Thelma and Louise share moments of love, hate, frustration, fun, terror and sheer exhilaration with each other, and by the end of their trip their car is holding a lifetime's worth of emotions and memories.

Lushly photographed by Adrian Biddle to showcase the rural back roads of America, Thelma & Louise is a most fulfilling, poignant and memorable journey.

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Movie Review: Body Of Lies (2008)

Body Of Lies brings a lot of firepower to the table, but none of it ignites and the film fizzles like a damp firecracker. The combination of Leonardo DiCaprio, Russell Crowe, director Ridley Scott and the turmoil in the Middle East should sparkle. Nothing goes right as everyone appears to sleepwalk through the proceedings, hampered by a lack of inspiration in William Monahan's script and an over-dependence on tiresome cliches.

DiCaprio is CIA field agent Roger Ferris, hunting terrorists on the streets of the Middle East, assisted by locals with dubious sympathies. Ed Hoffman (Crowe) is Ferris' handler, based in DC, less clever than he thinks he is and preoccupied with shuttling his kids to their suburban activities while trying to capture terrorists by long distance. Ferris gets a handle on a terrorist safe house in Amman, and connects with Hani Salaam (Mark Strong), the head of Jordanian Intelligence. Between Hoffman's meddling, Salaam's conniving, the terrorists' plotting, and Ferris' muddling, all the plans interfere with each other and not much of anything gets achieved by anyone. This may be a true reflection of progress in the Middle East, but it wasn't the intention of this movie to artistically fall flat on its face.

Body Of Lies is a graphic metaphor for America's foreign policy being out of its depth in the world's most dangerous neighbourhood, but it lacks any sort of emotional connection, captivating drama, or genuine personal involvement. DiCaprio tries but resoundingly fails to recreate the impact of his role in Blood Diamond, as an outsider more at home in a foreign land. Crowe is distracted enough to almost bring the movie to a standstill every time he's on the screen. And the artificially appended romance between Ferris and an Iranian doctor in Amman produces nothing but cringes. There are some moderately interesting action sequences, but without any intellectual or emotional capital to draw upon, even the shoot-outs and explosions come dangerously close to tedium.

Body Of Lies is more of a skeleton, with the bones of what would have been good ideas left to rattle in the empty box of lazy execution.

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Movie Review: Matchstick Men (2003)

A startling departure from director Ridley Scott, who is usually more interested in technology and action than psychology and drama, Matchstick Men benefits from a neurotic Nicolas Cage performance, but not much else sets the movie apart.

Roy (Cage) is a master con-man with issues: under stress he stutters, suffers almost uncontrollable facial ticks, is a carpet cleanliness freak, and has paranoid habits.  Roy's wife left him while she was possibly pregnant with a child that Roy never got to meet.  But along with his partner Frank (Sam Rockwell), he manages a comfortable living pulling off relatively small-time cons selling useless junk to seniors and emptying their bank accounts.

Frank suggests that Roy visit psychiatrist Dr. Klein (Bruce Altman) for treatment.  Klein helps Roy with his medications and also helps him find and for the first time connect with his now teenage daughter Angela (Alison Lohman).  Soon Angela has moved into her father's house and is enthusiastically drawn into his life of crime.  When Frank and Roy go after a big score to con a businessman out of a large sum, Angela's involvement complicates matters to dangerous levels until Roy finds himself staring at the biggest con of all.

Matchstick Men is primarily a character study, and Cage is quickly able to make Roy a sympathetic character despite his long list of faults and weaknesses.  The physical signs of stress and paranoia are almost over-played, but since Roy exclusively occupies the centre of the movie, Cage gets away with it.  He is surrounded by a bland performance from Rockwell, and a predictable one from Lohman.  Other than Cage there is not much drama or tension being generated, but he single-handedly provides enough energy to push the film forward.

As a con movie, Matchstick Men does not try to reach for the duplicity levels of The Sting or House Of Games, and Roy's psychological issues intuitively limit his abilities to pull off a big score, and make him susceptible to the tricks of others.  Scott does the right thing to focus on the people rather than the games; it's just that there is only one interesting man among the Matchstick Men.

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