Thelma & Louise
Brief Synopsis
Cast & Crew
Ridley Scott
Geena Davis
Susan Sarandon
Brad Pitt
Kenneth Turek
Noel Walcott
Film Details
Technical Specs
Synopsis
Thelma and Louise are accidental outlaws on a desperate flight across the Southwest after a tragic incident at a roadside bar. With a determined detective on their trail, a sweet-talking hitchhiker in their path and a string of crimes in their wake, their journey alternates between hilarious, high-speed thrill ride and empowering personal odyssey even as the law closes in.
Cast
Geena Davis
Susan Sarandon
Brad Pitt
Kenneth Turek
Noel Walcott
Rob Roy Fitzgerald
Ken Swofford
Shelly Desai
Kristel L Rose
Christopher Mcdonald
Michael Madsen
Stephen Tobolowsky
Stephen Polk
Lucinda Jenney
Harvey Keitel
Marco St John
Timothy Carhart
Jack Lindine
Jason Beghe
Sonny Davis
Michael Delman
Carol Mansell
Crew
Steve Adcock
Andrew Aguilar
Anne H. Ahrens
Robin Allen
David Alvin
Paul Amorelli
Leslie Anne Anderson
Audie Aragon
J Tom Archuleta
Richard Arrington
Christine Baer
Gregory J Barnett
Bobby Bass
Bobby Bass
Richard J Bayard
Ira Belgrade
Paul Bellman
Walter Berner
Sam Bernstein
Scott Bernstein
Adrian Biddle
Gerald Bowne
Steve Boyum
Tony Brown
Cary Burns
David Burton
Larry D Campbell
Diana Campbell-rice
David Canestro
Michael A Carter
Toni Childs
Toni Childs
Gary A. Clark
Stephanie Claxton
Norman Cole
Lynn Collis
Terry Collis
Terry Collis
John Anthony Connell
Anthony Cortino
James M. Cox
Thomas P Cox
Steve Danton
Gordon Davie
Lisa Dean
Tracy Defreitas
Bonita Dehaven
Mel Dellar
Bob Dewitt
Louis Digiaimo
Dennis Dodd
John Doe
K C Douglas
Bernard Edwards
Kenny Endoso
Tony Epper
Audrey Evans
Marianne Faithfull
Glory Fioramonti
Addie Flores
Glenn Frey
Glenn Frey
Craig Galloway
Frank Galvan
Robert Geddins
Marty Gibbons
Mimi Polk Gitlin
Anthony Goldschmidt
Tim Gonzalez
Craig Graham
Pauline Granby
Diane Kay Grant
Kenneth Haber
Jeffrey J. Haboush
Lisa Hackler
Marguerite Happy
Ross Harpold
Paul Arthur Hartman
Graham V Hartstone
Pete Haycock
Les Healey
John Hiatt
Don Hildebrand
Michael Hirabayashi
Buddy Joe Hooker
Hank Hooker
Norman Howell
Grayson Hugh
Grayson Hugh
Kenji Inouye
Roger Janson
Martin Jedlicka
Will Jennings
Todd K Jensen
Scott Judge
Aaron Katz
Alan S Kaye
Nisa Kellner
James M Kelly
Paul Kennerly
Callie Khouri
Callie Khouri
B. B. King
Holly Knight
Luca Kouimelis
Sherman Labby
Taneia Lednicky
Nicolas Lemessurier
Alexandra Leviloff
Stewart Levine
Blake Lewin
Kenny Loggins
Billy Lucas
J. Steven Matzinger
Elizabeth Mcbride
Michael Mcdonald
Michael Mcdonald
Gavin Mckillop
John C. Meier
Ann Melville
Michelle Michael
Patrick Mignano
Dan Mindel
Bob Miyamoto
Tim Monich
Bennie Moore
Timothy J Moran
Van Morrison
Mark Miller Mundy
Johnny Nash
Johnny Nash
Michael Neale
Roland Neveu
Kevin Newett
Thom Noble
Stephen Patrick Norman
David Nowell
Dean O'brien
Dean O'brien
James Olson
David Orr
Cee Ozenne
Brett Palmer
Dan Parada
David Paris
Stan Parks
Julie Payne
Chris Peppe
Laura Perlman
Richard Perry
Mary Peters
Wendolyn Peterson
Victor Petrotta
Victor Petrotta
Mike Porter
Janet L Powell
Richard Raymond Powell
John Poyner
Darrin Pulford
Kevin S Quibell
Monti Rainbolt
James T Randol
Brad Rea
Martha Reeves
David Richards
David Ricketts
Jay Rifkin
Bob Risk
Cal Roberts
Mary Margaret Robinson
William Robinson Jr.
Nile Rodgers
Robert Rogers
Ronnie Rondell
Bobby Rose
Erich O Rose
Chuck Roseberry
Joe Rowan
Michael C Ryan
Tim Salmon
Lazar Samarzich
Robert Samarzich
Joe Sample
Ed Sanford
Elliot Scheiner
Michael Scott
Ridley Scott
Brian Scott Senechal
Charlie Sexton
Charlie Sexton
Billy Sherrill
Jimmy Shields
Gerald L Sidwell
Shel Silverstein
Don Smith
John Smock
Scott Snyder
Norris Spencer
Bette Stanton
Deborah Stenard
Photo Collections
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Movie Clip
Trailer
Film Details
Technical Specs
Award Wins
Best Original Screenplay
Award Nominations
Best Actress
Best Actress
Best Cinematography
Best Director
Best Editing
Articles
Thelma & Louise
And do they ever propel! There's no sign of a soapbox here. It's all gearbox as you're swept up in the exhilaration of their flight from small-town Arkansas drudgery in Louise's sea-green vintage T-Bird. They floor it after thumbing their noses at Thelma's stifling fathead salesman and Louise's country'n'western Peter Pan. Even when initial larkiness gives way to something darker and more desperate after an ugly attempted rape and an act of violence that follows it, the film still sweeps you along. Like the best road movies, Thelma & Louise is drunk on recklessness, intent on seeing the open road as an escape hatch, even though it may end up being just another noose.
As they run the gamut of American male loserdom en route - from the vicious would-be rapist to a caricatured clown of a chauvinist truck driver, with several easier-to-take if hardly more admirable types in between, including a slick hustler played by Brad Pitt on the verge of his career breakout -- the film never simply sets up their adversaries to be offed, as most male excursions in this genre do. The women react humanly and in some cases humanely, as in Sarandon's touching scene when she kisses off Michael Madsen's nice guy lightweight. Or in a scene when, cornered and armed, they display a change of heart and decide not to shoot a state trooper pursuing them when he tells them he has a wife and children. "You be sweet to them," says Thelma in the film's most quoted line. "My husband wasn't sweet to me, and look how I turned out!"
By then, they're in deep trouble. Thelma & Louise abounds in ironies. The big one is that as both women's spirits expand, their range of possibilities cruelly shrinks. Another is that they have liberation thrust upon them by a would-be rapist who attacks Thelma in a parking lot. After he's gunned down, the film takes the plunge into no-looking-back territory. No less than Faye Dunaway's Bonnie in Bonnie and Clyde (1967) or Glenn Close's uncontrollable career women in Fatal Attraction (1987), it's a seizure of power by a strong woman who isn't afraid to pull the trigger. In doing so, these two women also boldly grab what had pretty much been a hitherto exclusively male prerogative - the right to hit the road and get in touch with themselves. And, secondarily, subvert male monopoly.
Just when Sarandon's Louise, the earth mother of the two, finds her spirits flagging after Pitt's slickster robs them, Davis's hitherto dependent Thelma acquires newfound nerve. Suddenly you feel rangy Thelma testing her wings, and delighted to find they work. Later, when the possibility of surrender is raised, you believe her when she says she can't go back, that somewhere she crossed a line. And you note the proud tilt Sarandon brings to Louise's chin to realize that Louise won't clip their wings, either. You feel that both have crashed through a male-dominated society's roadblocks - literal and figurative - in an ending that amounts to a moral victory if not quite a triumph.
It was shrewd of screenwriter Callie Khouri to make Harvey Keitel's pursuing cop the nicest guy in Thelma & Louise, seen chasing them, occasionally speaking to them by phone, and leading the army of men closing in on them. The women, who embark on desperate remedies in the aftermath of a rape attempt because they're convinced nobody will believe they've been attacked (not hailing from a milieu that would have immediately realized a reasonably competent defense attorney could have got them off), can, inevitably, run only so far. But not before they become whole in a landscape that - temporarily at least - gives them some spiritual elbow room. The film's big, bold panoramic images mythify with enduring potency the themes it taps.
Thelma & Louise is Hollywood doing what it does best - vividly connecting with simmering issues waiting to erupt as works of pop culture, giving them shape and form, then shoving them into a national arena starved for vigorous - as opposed to merely strident - discourse. More than reinventing and repopulating Easy Rider (1969), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), or The Sugarland Express (1974), the big pop myth that isThelma & Louise does more than just reverse a lot of the power plays in which male-dominated Hollywood has been trafficking for years. It's a depth charge, exploding at some subterranean level, providing an exit point for huge masses of disequilibrium needing redress. And its visuals reinforce its theme of expanding spirits through sheer scale and spaciousness.
Thelma & Louise giddily inhales the open spaces of the American West as perhaps only an outsider can - director Ridley Scott is British. Not since the wonderstruck cameras of Wim Wenders and Percy Adlon wandered America's Southwestern desert in Paris, Texas (1984) and Bagdad Café (1987), respectively, has the West (well, Bakersfield, California, where most of the filming took place) been served up in the last decades of the 20th century in so visually supercharged a manner. Although Khouri won the film's only Oscar® (for Best Original Screenplay), Scott earned his directing nomination, while Sarandon and Davis presumably canceled one another out when both were nominated as Best Actress. (Also nominated: Adrian Biddle, for Best Cinematography.)
The movie isn't perfect. There are times, you note with irritation, when Scott hasn't entirely got away from his advertising background. Davis's sex scene is merely slick (although Pitt contributes wit), and Scott has a way of backlighting his heroines in the manner of a shampoo ad. But who had any idea that Scott - whose reputation rests mainly on his visuals, and who has since retreated to a string of boldly-contoured but thematically safe action movies - could get this far with a character-based film in a classical American mold? Even though the stacking of the odds against the women is pretty blatantly manipulative, and the men are pretty simplistically drawn, you'd have to be dead inside not to respond to the friendship forged by these two women. They surprise us as much as they convince us they surprise each other as the ante keeps getting raised. You don't have to be a woman to love Thelma & Louise.
Producer: Mimi Polk, Ridley Scott
Director: Ridley Scott
Screenplay: Callie Khouri
Cinematography: Adrian Biddle
Art Direction: Lisa Dean
Music: Hans Zimmer
Film Editing: Thom Noble
Cast: Susan Sarandon (Louise Sawyer), Geena Davis (Thelma), Harvey Keitel (Hal), Michael Madsen (Jimmy), Christopher McDonald (Darryl), Stephen Tobolowsky (Max), Brad Pitt (J.D.), Timothy Carhart (Harlan), Lucinda Jenney (Lena, the Waitress), Jason Beghe (State Trooper)
C-130m. Letterboxed. Closed Captioning. Descriptive Video.
by Jay Carr
Thelma & Louise
Quotes
Trivia
Miscellaneous Notes
Nominated for a 1992 French Cesar award for Best Foreign Film.
Susan Sarandon was named runner-up for best actress of 1991 by the National Society of Film Critics.
Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis tied for the Best Actress of 1991 citation from the National Board of Review.
Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis tied for 1st runner-up in the New York Film Critics Circle's voting for Best Actress of 1991. Callie Khouri was also named 1st runner-up in the category of Best Screenplay.
Ridley Scott was nominated for the Directors Guild of America's 1991 Outstanding Directorial Achievement Award.
Harvey Keitel was named best supporting actor of 1991 by the National Society of Film Critics for his performances in "Thelma & Louise" (USA/91), "Bugsy" (USA/91) and "Mortal Thoughts" (USA/91).
Geena Davis was named first runner-up for best actress of 1991 by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.
Geena Davis was named best actress of 1991 by the Boston Society of Film Critics.
Released in United States Summer May 24, 1991
Released in United States on Video January 8, 1992
Released in United States July 1991
Released in United States August 1991
Released in United States October 1991
Shown at International Taormina Film Festival July 21-28, 1991.
Shown at Norwegian Film Festival in Haugesund August 18-24, 1991.
Shown at Valladolid Film Festival October 18-26, 1991.
Callie Khouri received a Golden Globe for Best Screenplay from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.
Began shooting June 11, 1990.
Completed shooting August 31, 1990.
In addition to letterbox and pan-and-scan formats, "Thelma & Louise" will be made available in Beta, 8mm and in a Spanish-subtitled VHS version.
Expanded release in Australia September 5, 1991.
Released in United States Summer May 24, 1991
Released in United States on Video January 8, 1992 (in both letterbox and pan-and-scan formats)
Released in United States July 1991 (Shown at International Taormina Film Festival July 21-28, 1991.)
Released in United States August 1991 (Shown at Norwegian Film Festival in Haugesund August 18-24, 1991.)
Released in United States October 1991 (Shown at Valladolid Film Festival October 18-26, 1991.)