As director Ridley Scott mentions in his commentary for the new Blu-ray release of Thelma & Louise: “I wanted to do a people-driven story.” Scott had already made a mark with two of the most significant science-fiction films of the 1980s, Blade Runner and Alien. With Thelma & Louise (1991), he found a character-driven story set in the present.
Working from Callie Khouri’s Oscar-winning screenplay, Scott fashioned a road picture with all the predictable elementsa pair of protagonists, a cool retro car, the desolately scenic landscape of the American Southwest, a smash-‘em-up car chase. But Khouri and Scott turned the tiresome genre sideways by casting women as the protagonists. Louise (Susan Sarandon) and Thelma (Geena Davis) are girls who just want to have fun on a weekend trip without Louise’s emotionally uncertain boyfriend and Thelma’s jerk-off husband. The vacation turns into a flight from the law after Louise shoots dead a lowlife who tries to rape Thelma in a honky-tonk parking lot.
Why some saw their suicidal swan dive into the Grand Canyon as a liberating gesture remains puzzling. Certainly, the plot is constructed to show Louise and Thelma as women penned-up in a man’s world with fewer options than they’d like and less dignity than they deserve. As always, Ridley Scott found many ways to make the journey visually interesting.
