It’s a good week to be June Squibb, and to be a fan of June Squibb. The 94-year-old stage and screen veteran can be heard (if not exactly seen) in the biggest movie in the world right now – yes, that’s her as the wistful, sentient embodiment of nostalgia in Inside Out 2. Delightful as this voice-acting cameo is, it’s something of an appetizer for a fuller meal arriving in theaters today: the gentle, quirky indie comedy Thelma, which offers Squibb the first leading role of her 30-plus-year movie career. It’s a pleasure to see a character actress who’s worked with such heavy-hitters as Martin Scorsese, Alexander Payne, and Todd Haynes finally step into the spotlight – even if the movie itself is a cutesy trifle a little too tickled by its own geriatric spin on a revenge movie.
Squibb’s character, Thelma Post, is an elderly widow getting by pretty well on her lonesome. Not that she’s really alone. Her grandson, twentysomething Danny (Fred Hechinger), is a mensch who checks on her often; the movie opens with him patiently showing her how to check her email. Writer-director Josh Margolin (making his feature debut) uses these early scenes to efficiently establish Thelma as a self-reliant woman not ready to sacrifice her independence. “I fall down, I’m toast,” she tells Danny. “So I don’t fall down.”
But she does fall for a scam – a phony $10,000 bail request for Danny, whose voice the swindlers clone over the phone. For those counting, this is the second movie this year that’s started with telescammers bilking a kindly old woman out of a giant chunk of change. Thelma, in fact, premiered at Sundance just six days after Jason Statham’s Beekeeper put the cold-calling scum of the Earth in his crosshairs. Sadly, Squibb does not chop off a phisher’s fingers with a buzzsaw in this movie. But her character does resolve to take matters into her own hands and track down the bad guys, if only to prove to herself and her family that she doesn’t need anyone else to solve her problems for her.
Thelma is a comedy for people who might find the very idea of an action movie starring a polite, technology-challenged grandmother hilarious on principle. Much of the humor hinges on Margolin applying certain urgent-thriller affectations to situations modest in scale and fairly low on danger. Some sub-Ocean’s Eleven heist music kicks in when Thelma plots to lift a handgun from a less mobile senior. Elsewhere, a climactic suspense sequence comes down to whether she can figure out how to close a pop-up window. Much has been made of the nonagenarian Squibb doing her own stunts – a savvy PR hook the film teases with an early scene of Thelma and Danny watching Mission: Impossible. But these sequences are all variations on the same tame joke. Watching Squibb speed around a retirement community on a stolen scooter, it’s difficult to say that Thelma is much different than a young-at-heart yukfest like Zach Braff’s Going in Style remake or half of the comedies Robert De Niro makes these days.
When not tracing his heroine’s sputtering cross-town voyage to get her money back, Margolin lingers with her concerned relatives. It’s always nice to see Parker Posey and Clark Gregg in anything, but their helicopter-parent characters – fussing over both the younger Danny and the older Thelma – suggest that this is one family where likability majorly skipped a generation. Too much of the movie’s slim 98-minute runtime is devoted to Danny’s post-breakup fears that he’s a helpless screwup. In paralleling his story with Thelma’s, the movie makes a sweet point about how everyone wants to feel in control of their lives, regardless of age. But it’s a pretty drippy subplot, like something out of an equally mild but less distinctive indie comedy. At least these scenes could be said to make Thelma’s ambling misadventure look more exciting by comparison.
You can hear whispers of a deeper movie whenever Margolin slows the action and gives Squibb the floor. She has great chemistry with the late Richard Roundtree, who’s affecting and dignified as Ben, a fellow widower and old friend who Thelma ropes into her plan. That we’re seeing his final performance lends some extra weight to the pair’s conversations about getting older, losing loved ones, and struggling to maintain some semblance of autonomy in your twilight years. “Means well” is the definition of damning with faint praise, but Thelma really does; at its best, the film acknowledges the challenges the elderly face in navigating a world that alternately exploits and dismisses them.
“Let’s not be maudlin,” Thelma tells Ben when they first reunite. The movie, to its credit, rarely is. Or is that to Squibb’s credit? Rising to the occasion of this long-overdue star vehicle, she makes Thelma a little salty, a little sweet, a real person, and never a cliché – which is no small feat given that she’s playing, quite literally, a gun-toting grandma. If the film manages to straddle the line between finding good-natured humor in the character’s cluelessness about gadgets without totally making older Americans the butt of the joke, Squibb is the reason. She deserves this moment at center stage. May she get another that doesn’t combine a hearing-aid gag with a walking-away-from-an-explosion gag.
