Saturday, November 9, 2024

"Thelma" and "Treasure"

June Squibb is an unlikely candidate for an action star.  The veteran actress is well into her 90s, and has just played her first screen lead, as the title character of "Thelma."  Written and directed by Josh Margolin, "Thelma" is about a grandmother who is bilked out of ten grand by a phone scammer pretending to be her twenty-something grandson Josh (Fred Hechinger), and decides to get her money back herself.  This involves fooling her overprotective daughter (Parker Posey) and son-in-law (Clark Gregg), and enlisting the help of her friend Ben (Richard Roundtree), who has moved into a retirement community.


The marketing has been selling "Thelma" as a spoof of action films like "Mission: Impossible," which it is to an extent.  There's a tour of several common action movie tropes, including a game of chicken with mobility scooters, car chases, some gunplay, and even a shot of our heroes walking away from an explosion. However, for the most part "Thelma" is an extremely gentle, light-hearted comedy that is much more concerned with the reality of getting old.  Thelma is strong-minded and still fiercely independent, but she can no longer drive, struggles with anything involving a computer, and has outlived her husband and most of her friends.  Her rebellious streak is a lot of fun, but her loved ones rightly point out that Thelma has reached a point where she has to accept more help, as hard as it is.  I wasn't remotely surprised to discover that both "Thelma" the movie and Thelma the character are largely based on Margolin's grandmother and her experiences. 


The performances make the movie, and Squibb is a charmer.  She and Richard Roundtree handily carry the bulk of the screen time, and have a great rapport with each other.  They know how to get laughs, but more importantly nail the pathos inherent in seeking out one last adventure together.  I'm also happy to see more good work out of Fred Hechinger, who gets a solid subplot about Josh being stuck in a rut after a breakup, and trying to figure out what to do with his life.  The writing is well-observed, the comedy makes great use of the element of surprise, and "Thelma" is altogether more than what I was expecting.        


Now on to "Treasure," based on the work of journalist Lily Brett, and directed by Julia von Heinz.  This is a smaller Holocaust-themed film that I'm worried is going to fall through the cracks, despite a pair of excellent performances and very touching subject matter.  Lena Dunham plays Ruth, a New York based journalist who has come to Poland in the early 1980s to search for her family's roots.  Her jovial, but very evasive father Edek (Stephen Fry) has come with her.  He speaks Polish and she does not.  He's able to arrange a driver, Stefan (Zbigniew Zamachowski), make friends with just about everyone he meets, and find a way to enjoy himself just about anywhere.  Ruth, who has put a lot of effort into planning the trip, doesn't appreciate that her father keeps bulldozing her itinerary and seems to want to stymie her efforts.  


I was immediately interested in "Treasure" when I saw that Stephen Fry and Lena Dunham had been cast as a father and daughter trying to navigate a road trip and some touchy emotional territory together.  These two pair very well onscreen, with Fry being the big personality he's so good at being, while Dunham is much more restrained and buttoned-up as the adult daughter with a lot of insecurities.  As someone who has been on a few trips in foreign countries with lovingly critical parents, I related to Ruth a lot.  I came into "Treasure" not sure of how much Holocaust material was actually going to be in the film, so I was perfectly happy to watch two hours of Edek and Ruth just trying to bond and navigate 1980s Poland together.  This is the kind of awkward, but heartwarming situational comedy that appeals to me.   


When the film does start digging into Edek's traumatic past and all the resulting fallout, I was even more appreciative that the film had spent so much time letting us get to know Edek and Ruth first.  The parts of the film focusing on past history easily could have been overwhelming, but here they're presented in the context of an ordinary family's history.  And it feels so much more personal and grounded in reality than many similar films.  The scope is small, but the relationships ping as genuine.  And the wins feel monumental.


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