Thelma & Louise (R)
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This was released in 1991, and pretty much became an instant classic. So it's something I've wanted to see ever since then, but I didn't see it until 2018. I'm afraid I didn't like it quite as much as I'd hoped I would, but I still thought it was good.

Thelma Dickinson (Geena Davis) and her friend Louise Sawyer (Susan Sarandon) are planning to go out of town for a weekend vacation. Thelma is married to an asshole named Darryl, and she decides not to tell him about the trip. Louise has a boyfriend named Jimmy, whom she doesn't see very often because of his job, and she doesn't tell him about the trip, either. Before reaching their destination, Thelma convinces Louise to stop at a country & western bar. There, a man named Harlan buys them drinks and asks Thelma to dance, which she does (against Louise's advice). Later, Thelma and Harlan go out into the parking lot, where he tries to rape her. He's stopped by Louise, who has a gun that Thelma had brought on the trip. After Harlan lets Thelma go, he continues to insult the women, which leads to Louise fatally shooting him. After that, Thelma and Louise go on the lam. Louise wants to go to Mexico, but at first Thelma is unsure what she wants to do.

The murder is investigated by a police detective named Hal Slocumb (Harvey Keitel), who is apparently sympathetic to the women, though he still has to try to find them and arrest them. He works with an FBI agent named Max (Stephen Tobolowsky), who is not so sympathetic. Meanwhile, Louise calls Jimmy and asks him to take her $6700 in savings out of the bank and wire it to her. When she calls him again later, he tells her where he's wired the money, so she can go collect it. And at one point, Thelma meets a hitchhiker named J.D. (Brad Pitt), whom she wants to give a ride... but it's Louise's car, so it's up to her, and she doesn't think it's a good idea. (I thought it was kind of strange that someone who had so recently experienced attempted rape would be so quick to trust another man she didn't know, but of course how other people choose to cope with their own traumas is none of my business. Besides which, that's just the sort of person Thelma is. Trusting.) Um... so, at first they don't give J.D. a ride, but later, after they've been driving for awhile, they see him again, and this time Louise gives in to Thelma's wishes, and they pick him up. (I couldn't tell if he had found some other way to get part of the way to his destination, or if they had doubled back to pick him up.) Later, when Louise goes to pick up the money Jimmy was supposed to wire her, she finds that he has instead brought the cash himself. (Up til this point, I had been unsure whether he would turn out to be a good guy or another asshole, and the fact that he disregarded Louise's wishes made me suspect the latter. However, it eventually turns out that he's a relatively good guy, after all.) Louise and Jimmy spend the night together in one motel room, while Thelma and J.D. spend the night in another room.

Well, beyond this point, I don't want to spoil anything that happens. I'll just say that Thelma and Louise continue to have a series of escapades, before the police finally catch up with them. I also want to say I found it fairly interesting that for the first part of the movie, Louise was much more confident and decisive than Thelma, but their roles were basically reversed for the latter part of the movie. As for the ending... well, that's too famous for me not to have known about it for a long time before I ever saw the movie. So I don't think it had as much impact for me as it might have had if it had come as a surprise. Then again, I suspect I would have guessed what was going to happen shortly before it did happen, even if I hadn't known it was coming. But I still don't know what I would have thought about it, or how I would have felt about it. Actually, I'm not sure how I do feel about it. Part of me feels like it was the only possible ending (though obviously there was one other possibility, even if it would have been anticlimactic). And part of me feels... nothing, really. Like what happens is just... a thing that happens, with no particular meaning or emotional resonance. Almost as if I were in a state of shock, I guess. Maybe it's because my own issues, such as depression, can often make me feel detached. Or maybe it's as simple as the movie as a whole not affecting me as much as I expected it to. I mean, I hated Harlan during the parking lot scene, and I suppose I liked his being killed. And I sympathized with Louise and Thelma. And I thought some of the other stuff that happened in the movie was kind of cool. But mostly... yeah, I think I just felt detached, for a lot of the movie. Including the iconic ending. But still, I'm really glad I've finally seen it.