FAQ

Arkansas waitress Louise Sawyer (Susan Sarandon) and her friend, housewife Thelma Dickinson (Geena Davis), plan a two-day fishing trip at the woodsy cabin of one of Louise's friends...mostly to have a little vacation and give Thelma a break from her demanding husband Darryl (Christopher McDonald). Along the way, they stop for drinks at a roadside bar, Thelma has a bit too much to drink and winds up in the parking lot with Harlan (Timothy Carhart), a guy she's been dancing with all evening. Louise comes out just in time to stop Harlan from raping Thelma. As they're about to walk away, however, Harlan makes a comment about how he wishes he'd raped Thelma anyway, and Louise shoots him with Thelma's handgun. Certain that no one will believe that Thelma was being raped, what with how she was flirting with Harlan, the girls decide to run towards Mexico. Unfortunately, both state police investigator Hal Slocomb (Harvey Keitel) and the FBI are hot on their trail.

Thelma & Louise is based on script by American screenwriter Callie Khouri.

A green 1966 Ford Thunderbird convertible.

After burning out the nasty trucker's rig, Louise and Thelma drive on. They are spotted by the highway patrol and pursued in a high speed chase. They momentarily elude their pursuers when Louise drives the T-bird convertible through an overpass under which the roofed police cars cannot fit. They continue up the road, but it only leads them to the edge of an enormous canyon that Louise thinks might be the Grand Canyon. A large helicopter carrying Slocumb suddenly appears before them, and dozens of police cars close in behind them. With nowhere to go and only imprisonment ahead of them, Thelma tells Louise to "keep going". Realizing what Thelma is suggesting and agreeing, Louise kisses Thelma and then hits the accelerator. Slocumb runs behind their car in an attempt to stop them, but to no avail. In the final scene, the car soars off the cliff. As the credits start to roll, scenes of Thelma and Louise's past few days "flash before our eyes."

The DVD shows an alternate ending where Thelma and Louise drive off the cliff and the car goes sailing into the air, just like in the regular ending. The scene then continues to see the car near the bottom of the canyon. The car falls behind a large rock. The final scene shows a car tooling down a long highway in the desert, but there's so much dust flying behind it that you cannot actually see the car. The song playing is B.B. King's "You Better Not Look Down." Viewers who have seen the alternate version have interpreted it three different ways: (1) It's not Thelma and Louise's car, (2) Thelma, Louise, and their car somehow survived the fall, and/or (3) it's meant to show that Thelma and Louise's spirits live on. Director Ridley Scott explains that it is Thelma and Louise's car, shown as a symbolic shot of their "final escape," which is death to every living creature.

Road trips movies by women are scarce, but there is one. In Leaving Normal (1992), two women take off on a roadtrip from Normal, Wyoming to Palmer Valley, Alaska. Another one is Queen & Slim.