Thelma & Louise are two Arkansas friends who set out together for a getaway weekend. Mostly what they’re getting away from is their entire lives, embodied in their unsatisfactory menfolks. Thelma (Geena Davis) is a housewife who’s been frozen in infantile dependency by her marriage to Darryl (Christopher McDonald), a cretinous petty tyrant. Louise (Susan Sarandon) is a waitress who’s been through it all, including a current affair with Jimmy (Michael Madsen), a musician who can’t get his emotional chops together. So off they roar happily in Louise’s peeling green 1966 Thunderbird. But at their first pit stop a local superpig tries to rape Thelma, with shockingly violent consequences.
For a while the film, scripted by first-time screenwriter Callie Khouri, seems like an obvious feminizing of male-buddy road movies. The two women are an all too neatly matched pair: repressed Thelma who knows nothing, depressed Louise who knows everything. There are irritating plot ploys, such as Thelma’s fathomless ditsiness, which keeps getting them into hotter water. And Ridley Scott (“Blade Runner…… Alien,” “Black Rain”) appears to be an unlikely director for this project, until you remember that “Alien” was a kind of road movie in which space was the road and a woman (Sigourney Weaver) the hero. But once “Thelma & Louise” gets into second gear, it churns up terrific momentum, and the writing and direction fuse into a genuine pop myth about two women who discover themselves through the good old American ways of cars and criminality.
So “Thelma & Louise” winds up not as an imitation of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” or “Bonnie and Clyde” but as their spirited younger sister who goes her own compelling way. Pursued by a growing fleet of copmobiles, the buddies careen from crime to crime with an inexorable fatality that’s both comic and stirring. These delicious desperadoes bring new life to the frayed old idea of the outlaw as spiritual redeemer. As they stuff a flabbergasted highway cop into the trunk of his car, Thelma advises him: “You be sweet to your wife. My husband wasn’t sweet to me, and look how I turned out.”
Not everything in the film has such flair and flavor. At one point the women blow up a truck whose driver has made lecherous gestures. This creep is an unworthy antagonist; the scene is really there because Scott wanted a spectacular explosion. But the movie rides over such potholes, driven by Scott’s hurtling pace through the Southwestern truck stops and stunning landscapes captured by Adrian Biddle’s luscious photography. The women flower with each felony: Thelma learns about good sex; Louise comes to belated terms with her boyfriend. There’s only one really empathetic male in the movie: the detective (Harvey Keitel) who, improbably but affectingly, senses their essential innocence.
Sarandon and Davis give superb, wonderfully interactive performances: funky, fierce, funny and poignant. They create a friendship that goes way beyond the Butch Sundance syndrome in warmth and complexity. And they are triumphant in an end-of-the-road finale that may shock feminists (and others) but is true to the mythic nature of a big-hearted movie.
title: “Back On The Road Again” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-15” author: “Mittie Conley”
On March 1, during a concert in Lausanne, Switzerland, Berry was overcome by a headache in the middle of the song “Tongue.” Doctors assumed it was a migraine. When the pain persisted, the drummer checked into a hospital, where he learned that he’d burst a blood vessel on the right side of his brain. He underwent surgery–a craniotomy, if you must know-and the tour was postponed. Berry has fully recovered. “I feel great,” he says now. “I’m fine. I just get really nervous when ‘Tongue’ starts, and I’m really glad when it’s over.” Still, it’s a miracle that R.E.M. has resumed its travels, The band was shaken by its drummer’s attack–Stipe says it was “like dropping your transmission on the autobahn at 140 miles per hour”–and once they swore off touring altogether. “I remember saying, ‘I will never do this again. This is the last show we will ever perform live’,” Stipe says of 1989’s exhausting “Green” tour. “At the time I absolutely meant it. There was no way I’d be dragged onstage again.” How will R.E.M. survive this time around? Stipe laughs. “I don’t know. Therapy? Prozac? Lithium?”
Whatever it takes. It’s heartening to see the summer concert season launched by a band as vital as R.E.M. Last year dinosaurs like the Rolling Stones and the Eagles roamed the earth, thundering from stadium to stadium and eating money off the trees. It was a record-breaking season, and thank God it’s over. This summer will be modest in scope (box), but we’ll see music made, not just money. Yes, R.E.M.’s tour could reportedly gross more than $50 million. (This sold-out, 19-city leg ends in June. Another, for which tickets have yet to go on sale, starts up in September.) But this venture really seems to be about a band trying to find itself. In the ’80s. R.E.M. was a known commodity, famous for rippling minor chords and gorgeous, half-heard lyrics. Recently, though, the band has made disparate albums like the elegiac “Automatic for the People” and the trashy new “Monster,” which has sold 6 million copies. It’s been hard for fans (and maybe even R.E.M.) to figure out exactly who they are.
This summer we all find out. Unfortunately, the first of three shows at the amphitheater is frayed around the edges. The band employs two extra musicians to re-create the dense, distorted swagger of “Monster,” and it feels like overkill tonight: R.E.M. is many things, but it is not a guitar army. Some arrangements seem muddy, and Stipe’s voice plays hide-and-seek in the mix. At a party after the show, well-wishers crowd around the singer. Warner Bros. Records’ new chairman, Danny Gold-berg, points to the full moon and says, “The clouds literally parted for your encore.” But Stipe-his eyes ringed with liner, the word SPEAK written on his arm as a reminder “to be warm to people”-deflects everyone’s praise for the show. “I’m just glad it’s behind us,” he murmurs.
The following night it really is behind them. Stipe is more at ease than ever on-stage, shaking his butt at the audience and doing a wonderfully fey and bony belly dance. It’s not that R.E.M. is playing everything for laughs. “Turn You Inside-Out,” “Everybody Hurts” and “Let Me In”-the last of which is a song for Kurt Cobain that bassist Mike Mills plays furiously on one of Cobain’s old guitars–sound like exorcisms. It’s just that the band is chipping away at their somewhat pious image. R.E.M. mostly plays songs from the last half dozen years. Mills prowls up and down the catwalk on both sides of the stage. Guitarist Peter Buck executes a couple of little, Pete Townshend-style leaps. And Stipe? Part of him may be dark and inward, but another part of him is just a goofball. As the band’s about to launch into “Tongue,” a giant, shimmering disco ball descends and nearly hits him on the head.
R.E.M. may be the patron saints of all the new alternative-rock superstars. But as this show suggests, they’re more comfortable in their skin than their young counterparts. Unlike Pearl Jam-who, in a strange way, are the fussiest image-makers since Ma-donna–R.E.M. has never disowned their fans simply because they’ve mushroomed in number. And, unlike Nirvana, they’ve never disowned their songs simply because they’ve become hits. (OK, they disowned “Shiny Happy People,” but who wouldn’t?) R.E.M. isn’t concerned that people will think they’re sellouts for the obvious reason: they aren’t. After tonight’s show, the band holds a small press conference in the empty, chilly amphitheater. Stipe is wearing a Dr. Seuss-y wool hat, smoking a cigarette and looking as if he’d rather be celebrating back at the Ritz-Carlton bar. When someone asks if he’s worried about how big the band’s become, he jokes, “But I’ve lost six pounds since February!” Translation: Berry is back at his drums. The band is back on the road. And nobody’s worried about anything. Next question?
Giants like the Stones dominated in ‘94. This year younger, scaled-down acts take to the road.
Rebuffing Ticketmaster to play alternate venues. Starts June 16.
Starring Sonic Youth, Hole, Cypress Hill, Pavement, Sinead O’Connor, Beck and the Jesus Lizard. Starts July 4.
Featuring PJ Harvey, Veruca salt and Buffalo Tom. Starts July 21.
Featuring Veruca Salt, Dinosaur Jr, Wilco and the Pretenders. Starts late July.
The Cranberries, the Offspring, Tom Petty, Elton John and –of course–the Grateful Dead.
