As a feminist film, ‘Thelma & Louise’ fails miserably

On May 24, “Thelma & Louise” turns 25. Like many other 25-year-olds, it has much to be embarrassed about.

Even on its own terms, as a bluntly obvious feminist parable, the movie is a self-contradictory failure. Its regrettably schematic screenplay (which writer Callie Khouri won an Oscar for) shouts its points in the manner of a freshperson term paper from an only intermittently coherent Womyn’s Studies major.

You may recall the movie as a date-rape revenge saga wrapped up in a freewheeling outlaw adventure, but really it’s a story of two idiotic hysterics who make a series of daft decisions that are nobody’s fault but their own. Stupidity and hot tempers, not entrenched sexism, are the causes of their problems.

“Thelma & Louise” — the kind of movie that signifies that a feminist awakening has transpired with these lines: “I feel awake. Wide awake. I don’t remember ever feeling this awake” — doesn’t even contain a date rape. Louise (Susan Sarandon) shoots and kills Harlan (Timothy Carhart) in a parking lot not because he’s raping her friend Thelma (Geena Davis), with whom he had been dirty-dancing in a honky-tonk in Arkansas. Harlan backs off his attempted rape when Louise brandishes a pistol. She shoots him anyway — for trash-talking her while she’s walking away.

In other words, one of the heroes of the movie commits a completely unjustified murder and the other helps her flee justice.

There’s a lot of discussion about how society will never believe it was self-defense because Thelma and Harlan had been flirting in front of hundreds of people, but a) it really wasn’t self-defense and b) the cop (Harvey Keitel) on the case, while pleading with the pair to turn themselves in so he can help, makes it clear that the friends could get away with murder by falsely claiming the shooting was the only way to stop the rape. There is supporting evidence: While attempting rape, Harlan had struck Thelma, hard enough to leave marks.

Moreover, the Keitel character suggests Thelma’s status as a rape survivor is an extenuating circumstance that could aid her. In keeping with the screechy, speechy tone of the screenplay, the cop indicates to the robber played by Brad Pitt that he is actually rooting for the murderer and her accomplice: “There’s two girls out there that had a chance — they had a chance — and you screwed it up for them.” When you’re an outlaw and the cops are practically acting like your defense counsel, suicide (Thelma and Louise’s eventual choice) is an even stupider move than it usually is.

Late in the story, Khouri (having given Louise a line in which she admits the earlier shooting was not self-defense) scrambles for another excuse to justify the whole adventure and cites Thelma’s boorish husband, who is such a broadly drawn caricature of an oaf that he is seen standing on his own pizza while talking to the cop. In his first five minutes of screen time, Darryl (Christopher McDonald) is established as an abusive, lying philanderer who yells at three different people, in case anyone missed the point that he’s a jerk.

Kidnapping a (blameless) cop and locking him in a trunk, Thelma tells him, “I swear, three days ago, neither one of us ever would have pulled a stunt like this. If you was to meet my husband, you’d understand.”

How is Darryl’s behavior to blame for his wife’s friend committing murder? And where is Thelma’s agency? If the guy was that much of a jerk, she shouldn’t have stayed married to him. There’s no suggestion in the movie that she could not have simply left him.

Instead of finding solid reasons for her characters’ actions, Khouri paints a tableau of a landscape so infected with misogyny that women should enjoy carte blanche to respond with maximum indignation (at least on a fantasy level). Thelma and Louise blow up a trucker’s oil rig because of his lewd comments and naked-lady mudflaps, not because he did them any actual harm.

It’s as if Khouri is trying to paint feminists as given to hysterical overreaction. Teachable moments get garbled — just days after learning that being alone with a strange man is not a great idea, Thelma picks up a hitchhiker, who turns out to be a criminal, simply because he’s Brad Pitt, suggesting the lesson for women is “Be careful of men you don’t know, except the cute ones.”

The movie works better if you just think of it as a misogynist tale about unbelievably ditzy women who lose what remains of their reason under pressure and suffer the ultimate punishment.

Told to shoot the police officer’s radio, Louise shoots the radio that plays music instead of the one he uses for communication. Thelma reveals to a known criminal (Pitt again) that her destination is Mexico (and he promptly tells the police when he gets arrested). Thelma is so dumb, she leaves her money with this armed robber before waltzing off to breakfast (after sleeping with him) in a post-coital daze, suggesting women can’t think straight after a proper bonking. While attempting to slip out of the country, the women drive at 110 mph in the world’s most conspicuous getaway car (a 1966 convertible Thunderbird) and instead of selling it to score some extra cash while switching to a more low-key ride, Thelma instead gets the genius idea of funding their journey by holding up a convenience store at gunpoint in full view of a security camera.

And what the movie has to say about women drivers is really infuriating: The friends drive from Oklahoma City to Mexico via Monument Valley, way up on the Utah border, which is sort of like going from Baltimore to Boston via Pittsburgh. Director Ridley Scott must think women don’t know how to read a map.