Rent Thelma (2024)

Squibb & Roundtree are outstanding but some of the comedic elements quickly become tiresome - Thelma review by Timmy B

June Squibb is an absolute treasure. After a long & varied career doing mainly supporting roles, she came to wide public attention in Alexander Payne's critically successful road movie Nebraska, garnering an Oscar nomination in the process. Now, many years after that success, she has been given her first lead role in Thelma, another road movie which takes a gentle look at the determination of a elderly woman to bring a man who scammed her to justice.

Thelma Post (Squibb) is a 93 year old widow who lives in a big Los Angeles apartment. She is a spiky, vivacious & active woman who, despite her age, is still very much her own person. She is close to & supported by her grandson Danny, who is a good-hearted but aimless & directionless young man, whose constant nagging to take it easy and let him do everything for her has become grating. One day, she receives a scam phone call, convincing her to send $10,000 to a PO Box. Once she realises she has been conned, she decides to go on one last adventure to get her money back, assisted by her friend Ben (Roundtree.)

Whilst I only gave this film 3 stars, don't for a second think that it is not a gentle & extremely watchable adventure. As has been highlighted by many reviews, one of the best things about it is it's emphatic & pointed refusal to treat Thelma & her older friends in a patronising or mollycoddled way, which is a beautiful contrast to how many of the other characters do. One of the most amusing ways it does this is in an early scene, where Thelma & Danny are watching Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible, running across London rooftops (funnily enough showing the moment where Cruise mis-judged a jump & broke his ankle,) this being used as a juxtaposition of Thelma's impending adventure and the concern those around her would have that something similar would happen to her. The script instead treats her & Ben in particular as people who have had a rich and fulfilled life, but still have the spark of adventure inside them.

One of the other wonderful things this film does is to not make Thelma a picture-perfect, stereotypical grandmother who smiles sweetly & feels she has to blend into the background. She is an at-times tricky & obstinate woman, who refuses many of the aids which have been developed for older people, not to control them, but to assist them & stop an accident which could be devastating for them. By doing this, Thelma feels like a real person (although she was based on the writer/director's own grandmother, obviously in everything there is dramatic licence.)

But the main reason I gave the film 3 stars is due to the many times where the script attempts to inject comedy into scenes, but which are unbelievably tiresome & derail things, no more so than with the writing of Thelma/Danny's parents/daughter & son-in-law. At one point, when they are frantically in a car trying to find Thelma after she goes missing, the narrative stops for them to have an argument about how Waze is not a good satnav app, then the father panicking about turning onto a freeway. In other scenes, the parents incessant squabbling where they are in the nursing home or out searching for her, ranging from why their son's relationship failed to how they didn't exert enough control over Thelma, whilst played for laughs or impact, just came off as annoying.

But despite this, I did enjoy watching it. Malcolm McDowell, despite being 80 when filming, has lost none of the electric presence he brings to his roles. And Fred Hechinger really does wonders with his role, the polar opposite of the murderous Roman dictator in Gladiator 2. And leading the charge, June Squibb alone is worth the price of admission.