At 94, June Squibb offers a marvellous efficiency on this sentimental comedy from writer-director Josh Margolin, impressed by his personal grandmother, a video of whom is performed over the ultimate credit. It’s a movie which can also be absolutely impressed, greater than a little bit, by the a lot more durable motion pictures of Alexander Payne wherein Squibb has additionally carried out: she was the (late) spouse of Jack Nicholson’s cantankerous widower in About Schmidt from 2002, and received an Oscar nomination as Bruce Dern’s plain-speaking spouse in Payne’s 2013 film Nebraska. I additionally admired her delicate, affecting efficiency as a lady with dementia in Stephen Karam’s unusual chamber drama The People, from 2021.
That is fairly completely different: a strong, barely unreflective and unreal feelgood comedy. Squibb performs Thelma, a widow being taken care of and checked in on by her slacker grandson Danny (Fred Hechinger), who’s depressed at not with the ability to get something like a correct job. When she is scammed out of $10,000 by a fraudster on the cellphone, powerful Thelma units out to trace the dangerous man down, driving a mobility scooter borrowed from her gentleman admirer – a superb efficiency from the late Richard Roundtree. She has additionally borrowed a gun, of all of the innocent and hilarious issues, and as soon as this merchandise has fulfilled the future laid down for it by Chekhov in his dictum about what occurs to weapons produced in act one, it’s in fact solely forgotten about.
For me there’s a spoonful of sugar too many on this movie, and tellingly the determine of Danny (a projection of Margolin himself) is two-dimensional, and the film quite fudges his obvious loneliness and relationship heartbreak. Squibb is nonetheless actually good: no different casting is conceivable, and it’s good to see her get the lead flip she deserves.
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