A gregarious polyglot as a filmmaker, Ridley Scott has tried a bit of everything. By the time Thelma & Louise hits screens in 1991, he has already made two of the most important science fiction films of all time, and has tried his hand at historical drama, fantasy, and neo-noir. (In the thirty years since, he’s done pretty much everything else, except a musical.) Thelma & Louise, to my eye, is the gateway between his early efforts and everything that’s come afterwards; never a slouch as a visualist, this is the film where all the other substances of filmmaking come together with the kind of effortlessness that few directors are able to match.
Working from Callie Khouri’s acerbic script, we join our leads — Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis, never better — en route to a weekend fishing trip that goes quickly, gruesomely wrong when an act of sexual assault leads to murder. Neither woman — Louise (Sarandon), too old for her waitressing job and harbouring deep trauma from an unspecified past; Thelma (Davis), so cruelly repressed under the thumb of her bozo husband that she becomes an emotional juggernaut when unleashed — can face what the system will inevitably do to them if they turn and face the consequences of two women having killed a man. So they run.