June Squibb’s career has run on a different timeline to that of most movie stars: she made her film debut, in Woody Allen’s Alice, at the age of 60, and it was another 23 years before she landed her breakthrough role in Alexander Payne’s Nebraska. Her performance as an embittered pensioner who saltily badmouths past acquaintances and flashes the gravestone of an ex got her an Oscar nomination. It also got her a run of progressively less amusing naughty-granny roles. In Hollywood, older people can be blandly comforting support or quirky joke fodder but not much more.
In Thelma, however, the now 95-year-old Squibb gets her first leading role, as a phone-scam victim tracking down those who robbed her, and adds some welcome human shading to the pensioner-behaving-badly stereotype. Its heroine may ride a scooter on her quest for justice, but Josh Margolin’s film avoids cheap jokes of the old-people-say-the-darnedest things variety, and amid its generally cheery tone makes some sharp points about how society patronises and shortchanges its senior citizens.
