Word: thelma
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They are also free to behave like -- well, men. For all the talk that Thelma & Louise is the first major female buddy movie, it is more like a male buddy movie with two women plunked down in the starring roles. The heroines are irresistibly likable: the gentle, bewildered Thelma, married to a smug, low- rent, philandering salesman who wears more gold jewelry than she does, and for whom, when she takes off, she leaves dinner on a child's partitioned plate in the microwave; and Louise, the world-weary, wised-up waitress who has waited too long for her lounge...
...Thelma and Louise act out a male fantasy of life on the road, avoiding intimacy with loud music, Wild Turkey, fast driving -- and a gun in the pants. The movie has almost as many chase scenes per reel as Smokey and the Bandit. The characters don't confide in each other as real-life women would. When Thelma asks what happened in Louise's secret past in Texas that makes her murderous, Louise refuses to talk and warns her not to ask about it. She turns driving from Oklahoma to Mexico without going through the Lone Star State into...
...pair can't seem to just have fun with each other on this woman's weekend in which they are finally free of the men who hem them in. Thelma is still the teenager at the slumber party who gets bored and has to call a few boys to come over. Less than an hour out of town, she talks Louise into stopping at a raunchy bar, where she dances with a creep who then tries to rape her in the parking lot. The women are sympathetic enough characters by this time so that we leap over the hurdle many...
...becomes harder and harder to root for the heroines, who make the wrong choice at every turn and act more like Clint Eastwood than Katharine Hepburn. The day after her near rape, Thelma is begging Louise to pick up a hitchhiker. It requires a breathtaking midair somersault of faith to believe Thelma would be eager to take up with another stranger so soon and would let him into her motel room and go limp with desire after he admits he robs convenience stores for a living...
...turning point of Thelma's character rests on one of the most enduring and infuriating male myths in the culture: the only thing an unhappy woman needs is good sex to make everything all right. After a night of knock-over- the-nightstand sex with the hitchhiker, Thelma comes down to the coffee shop suffused with satisfaction and tells Louise, "I finally understand what all the fuss is about." Thelma is transformed, more confident and buoyant than she has ever been, reducing her angst to the simplistic notion that she was stuck with a husband who was insufficiently accomplished...