This past weekend, in order to dodge the barrage of endlessly repetitive political commercials, Bill and I rented a movie.  It’s called Thelma, and it’s nothing at all like that much earlier film Thelma and Louise.  In this one, the only actual car chase takes place on a three-wheeled, two passenger cart. 

Wait, let me guess.  You haven’t even heard of Thelma?  I’m not surprised.  I had wanted to see the movie in a theater, but it came and went in the blink of an eye, and I never got a chance.  It was buried under a rash of summertime dystopian superhero nonsense—in other words movies filled with not much dialogue but loaded with ear-splitting rounds of automatic gunfire.  

There’s some gunfire in Thelma, too—five shots total from an antique revolver! 

So why did the movie come and go in such a hurry?  For one thing, it’s a movie about an old lady—a ninety-four year old lady—actually played by a ninety-four year old actress, June Squibb, in her first-ever starring role.  Wait, you’ve never heard of June Squibb?  Turns out she’s been an actress for a very long time.  Her first appearance on Broadway was in the original stage production of Gypsy in 1959!

If you look at her list of credits, you’ll see she’s been in lots of movies over the years—movies you’ve probably seen—but you don’t remember her, right?  That’s because she was always in the background.  Kathy Bates’s character in the new Matlock series, is right. Older women are invisible—most especially to Hollywood screenwriters.

But back to Thelma.  The story is about an old woman who is scammed out of $10,000 by a kid masquerading as her grandson and claiming he needs the money to get out of jail.  Thelma, with the help of her tech-savvy grandson, sets out to get her money back no matter what!  (By the way, these kinds of grandson scams happen.  Don’t fall for one of them without knowing for sure your grandson IS involved!)

From my point of view, it didn’t hurt that the grandson was a tall, lanky, tech-savvy kid with red hair and a short red beard.  All of that reminded me of my grandson, Colt, who during the Den of Iniquity ordeal by podcasts, saved me from missing an interview by helping me locate the required search engine, Chrome, on my computer.  I was looking for it in the C’s form Chrome when I should have been looking in the G’s for Google Chrome.  Who knew?

The movie’s pacing and especially the soundtrack are on the money, and the characters are believable.  Thelma walks like an old lady because she is an old lady. The film acknowledges the fact that, at some point, when you fall you really can’t get up—without something or someone to help you.  

The sound-tract captures the absolute silence left in a home when a beloved spouse is no longer present as well as the reality that, for many people, the first sound they hear each day, is the beep in their ears when they turn on their hearing aids.  But most of all, the story shows the incredible value of those longterm friendships, ones that come complete with a lifetime’s worth of precious memories.

One scene that really tickled me, was the one that featured Thelma’s first hair-raising test-drive of that three-wheeled cart. Years ago, my best friend’s widowed mother, coincidentally also named Thelma, moved from Arizona to Florida to live with her daughter.  On her first trip to a grocery store, Thelma decided to take a ride on one of the available carts. She was able to start it just fine, but stopping was another issue entirely.  She ended up taking out an entire end-cap of canned goods, and I believe she was permanently banned from using carts from that moment on.

But what I liked most about the movie was the enduring connections between Thelma and the people around her, most especially the one between her and her grandson.  That one really spoke to me, and I have an idea it’ll speak to many of my readers as well.