Director: Josh Margolin
Cast: June Squibb, Fred Hechinger, Richard Roundtree, Clark Gregg
Have I Seen It Before: Nope. I’ve been oddly thwarted in my attempts to see the film over the course of the summer. Not the troubles I had with Wildcat (2023), but then again few things are. Imagine the egg on my face when I emerged, bleary-eyed from a screening of Horizon – An American Saga: Chapter One (2024) weeks ago to find that my plans to immediately pick up a screening of this, only to find that it had been sold out.
Did I Like It: This movie is sort of spooky, if I’m being perfectly honest. Sure, it’s a wonderful twist on a tried and true format of someone getting wronged, finding the world doesn’t really care, and the taking matters into their own hands, except the Charles Bronsan character is played by a woman in her 90s (Squibb). That subversion of the form provides some fresh avenues for humor, but it is never at anyone’s expense. Thelma may be diminished (as her friend Ben (Roundtree) might say) by age, but she is no dummy, nor is she the kind of quaint bumpkin-sage who Forrest Gump’s their way to a successful evening of the score. Similarly, her gen-z grandson Daniel (Hechinger) is lost in and overwhelmed by a world for which he wasn’t ready, but he takes enough after his grandma that when Thelma tells him she never had to worry about him, we aren’t worried about him either.
But how is it spooky? Well Daniel is a 24-year-old underachiever rambling around town in a mid-80s Diesel Mercedes barely kept together and far too messy for any reasonable adult to comprehend. As someone who was once a 24-year-old underachiever (some may say I got my act together just under the wire before 24, others may shake their head just as hard at the 40-year-old version) that strikes a little closer to home. There’s that moment in your life where you look at your parents and it seems like you’re being asked to play poker with Monopoly tokens, and your grandparents are similarly put upon for exactly the same reason. Maybe I just miss my various grandmas, but I’ve been thinking about them and Thelma since finally getting to see the movie.