Roll Out the Oldsters

Thelma a film by Josh Margolis.  With June Squibb, Fred Hechinger, Parker Posey, Clark Gregg, Richard Roundtree.  Streaming (for a fee) on Apple+.  ****

Thelma is an oldster movie, a genre I haven’t written about for some time but which has not gone away.  It is a crime movie in which the person going after the criminal is a plump arthritic 93-year-old woman (June Squibb) who walks at tortoise pace, cannot get up if she falls, spends her days doing needlepoint and trying to figure out her computer, is watched over by her feckless grandson Daniel (Fred Hechinger) who cannot figure out what he wants to do with his life or what to do with his girlfriend, denigrates his abilities (“I’m such a bitch”), and has not managed to renew his driver’s license, though he drives at will.  The man is a mess.

His parents Gail (Parker Posey) and Alan (Clark Gregg) are well-meaning permissive liberals who have given their son plenty of license—perhaps a tad too much—and now are reaping the rewards.  He makes Hamlet look like a decisive person (not to compare the works of art).

But the behind-the-scenes joke of the movie is that the person who helps Thelma is a friend named Ben from an assisted living facility, and is played by none other than Richard Roundtree, the star of Shaft.  The famous black private dick from the Isaac Hayes song is now tooting around on an electric scooter, playing Daddy Warbucks in the facility’s production of Annie, raving about the melon that the place serves (this becomes a running joke) and taking classes called oopsy woopsy (something like that), where oldsters learn what to do when they fall (that will be helpful later).  And the villain they finally unearth is Malcom McDowell, who famously played Alex in A Clockwork Orange.  Now he has a dusty lamp shop and is running scams with a young partner to make ends meet.  And getting oxygen from a tank.

To top it off, your reviewer has just turned 76.

The funny thing is that, despite its slow-motion progress (that electric scooter isn’t exactly the chase scene in Bullit), the movie is more than just Oh aren’t these oldsters cute!  It’s genuinely suspenseful, in a low-key arthritic way.  And the characters—at least from my end of the spectrum—are genuinely sympathetic, even the villains.  It ain’t easy being old.  And it keeps getting worse.  (Squibb herself is 93; the Thelma she portrays is director Josh Margolis’ own grandmother, who is still alive at 103.)

The scam is one I’ve actually encountered.  One day I answered my cellphone (which I usually don’t do, because the caller is Potential Spam) and somebody said some garbled and hurried words which I couldn’t understand.  I said, “Who is this?”  And the guy said, “It’s me, Dad.  It’s your son.”

I felt like saying, Oh yeah?  You got a name?  I hung up.

My son has never referred to himself as “your son” in his life.

Thelma in the movie can’t quite hear the caller, a problem she often has.  He does sound frantic and distressed, a state her grandson is often in.  He says he’s had an accident where he hit a pregnant woman, he’s in jail, and he needs her to send money to a lawyer.  It has to be cash.  Ten thousand bucks (at least he didn’t say in small bills).  I must admit that, if I had been Thelma, I might have taken a deep breath or two and talked to some people.  And it’s not easy to take $10,000 in cash out of a bank (a process which the movie doesn’t show).  She mails the money, later finds out that it wasn’t Daniel who called and that he is fine.  She doesn’t remember the address where she sent it, and the police are no help (though they don’t have a lot to go on).  They apparently run into this kind of scam all the time.

Thelma is feisty enough that this inertia from the police doesn’t satisfy her.  She manages to get back to the post office and find the slip of paper which had the address on it (the PO apparently doesn’t empty their trash often, a detail I found entirely believable, having recently visited my own PO).  At that point I might have thought she’d go back to the police—it would have been easy for them to find the owner of the PO box—but she takes matters into her own hands.  She finds her old friend Ben, who has that miraculous electric scooter.  And off they go, to the theme song of Shaft (not really, but that’s what I would have done).

This movie is right on the fine line between making fun of old people and looking at them wistfully, saying how wonderful they are.  They are wonderful, but not when they do something moronic, or fall down in the middle of a vacant lot and can’t get up.  This is also a situation where the movie is fun because you’re thinking of past roles these people played (Squibb was Jack Nicholson’s wife in About Schmidt, her first major film role, but she had a long career as a stage actress before that).  It’s nice that these old folks are getting a little cash to supplement their social security (unfortunately, Roundtree died a few months after making the movie).  And it’s a well-made caper movie.  It’s just not what you would call edge-of-your-seat fast-paced.

I don’t know that I’d pay big bucks in a theater for it.  But you can stream it on various platforms and watch it in the presence of your own home, so you don’t have to deal with rancid popcorn smells and people checking their cell phones.  And you can catch up on your needlepoint, or have some nice milk toast.