AGE AGAINST THE MACHINE

Now in theaters:

Thelma--Played by June Squibb, the title character is a widow in her nineties, living on her own in a lovely house in Encino, California. She's intelligent and proudly self-reliant, but she nonetheless falls prey to a scam; somebody claiming to be her beloved grandson Danny (Fred Hechinger) calls up claiming to have had an accident and to need $10,000 fast.

Before she can reach her daughter (Parker Posey) or son-in-law (Clark Gregg), Thelma has mailed the money. She's informed that there's little the cops can do, and her family tells her to let it go. But she can't. The theft has threatened her sense of independence, and left her furious, both at the perpetrators and herself.

She goes to see her old friend Ben (Richard Roundtree), who lives in a nursing home. She no longer drives, so she asks Ben if she can borrow his rather snazzy scooter to follow up a lead she's found on the scammer. Though he's horrified at what she wants to do, soon the two of them are zipping along the sidewalks of L.A. in the scooter, Thelma at the handlebars.

The writer-director is Josh Margolin, whose real-life Grandma, really named Thelma, was really targeted by such a scam. Though the real Thelma didn't fall for it, you can understand Margolin's impulse to dramatize such an infuriating, odious plot.

There's a certain raggedness to the movie's middle stretch. Margolin seems so delighted with the image of Thelma and Ben riding to vengeance on a scooter that he may have sacrificed a certain amount of narrative logic to it; it's hard to imagine that they couldn't have contrived a more efficient way to get across town. And Thelma's daughter and son-in-law seem underdeveloped and caricatured, though Hechinger's Danny is endearing. When this goodhearted but coddled and aimless kid in his early twenties bemoans his lack of life skills, plenty of us in the audience can empathize.

But the center of the movie, of course, is June Squibb's performance as Thelma. Now 94, Squibb has been around show business since the '50s--she was in the original Broadway run of Gypsy!--and in TV and movies since the '80s and '90s. She made an impression with her role in About Schmidt (2002) and got an Oscar nomination as Bruce Dern's salty wife in 2013's Nebraska, but this is her first star part.

She handles it with great skill, careful to keep Thelma from getting too twinkly and adorable, and giving her a reflective side. She also has a fine rapport with her costars, especially Roundtree, whose last film this was (it's dedicated to him). His quiet, dignified Ben has, unlike Thelma, accepted his declined status. He insists he likes living in the home, and playing Daddy Warbucks in the production of Annie there.

His idea of aging gracefully is not being a bother or a worry to younger people. In the buddy-picture structure of the movie, this makes him the fretful Danny Glover or Martin Lawrence to Thelma's Mel Gibson or Will Smith; he's quite literally getting too old for this shit.

The comparison isn't strained. Margolin's most fertile source of comedy here comes from shooting and editing the film like any tense urban action thriller; Nick Chuba's driving musical score helps a lot with this. When Thelma has to climb a steep flight of stairs or stand up on a bed to reach something in a high place, it's treated much the same as, say, Tom Cruise's daring feats in a Mission: Impossible movie, and you realize that, in terms of courage and risk, there really isn't much difference.

COLLAR ID

Opening in theaters today:

Father Stu--Stuart Long was a failed boxer in Montana who became a failed actor in L.A. who became a Catholic convert and then a seminarian and ultimately a priest. Mark Wahlberg has turned Long's odd career trajectory into a Hollywood tale, and a juicy star vehicle, with this biopic.

After hearing the story from a priest who was friends with Long, Wahlberg developed it as a film project, but the writer-director is Rosalind Ross, better known as Mel Gibson's longtime girlfriend and the father of one of his children. Early on, Ross endows the film almost with the flavor of a '70s-era friends-in-low-places comedy; it wouldn't seem out of character if Stu had Clyde the Orangutan as a sidekick.

While working the meat counter in a supermarket, like Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler, Stu beholds Carmen (Teresa Ruiz), a soulful local beauty, falls hard for her at first sight, and traces her to her church, where he learns she's a devout Catholic. A nonbeliever himself, he nonetheless hangs around and even converts to be near her, much to the shock of his fretful mother Kathleen (Jacki Weaver) and bitter, distant father Bill (Mel Gibson). Gradually, Stu wears Carmen down; she responds to the intensity and seriousness of his passion for her.

She's prepared to marry him when, after recovering from a hideous accident, he announces that he's decided to become a priest instead. But his sufferings don't end when he gets to the seminary; quite the opposite. The Church leadership resists his priestly ambitions, first because of his rowdy background and later, disgustingly, because they fear that the muscular illness with which he's been afflicted makes him unworthy to perform the sacraments.

Although I'm not Catholic, like the real Stu Long I went to a Catholic college. Perhaps because I didn't grow up in the church, but received the benefit of an excellent Catholic liberal education, it's possible I'm in a position to be more appreciative of the institution than my many pissed-off lapsed Catholic friends. Besides, I've read too much Flannery O'Connor and Graham Greene not to respond to this story.

But Stu winning the glorious Carmen's heart seemed like miracle enough to me; it seemed outrageous that he would then break it off with her to go to seminary. Still, my annoyance with his choice didn't make the sanctimony and hypocrisy he faced from the Church any less infuriating. In the end, I invested emotionally in his struggle; it's enough that it's what Stu wants.

There's reason, however, to suspect that the movie commits its own sins of omission. Ross's script pares down the real Stu's life to its most turbulent aspects, seemingly to make him look less accomplished, more of a desperate screw-up. It leaves out, among other things, the fact that he was a college grad before he went to seminary and spent years as the manager of the Norton Simon Art Museum before his calling. Wahlberg's portrait of him as a slovenly, drawly, dangling-cigarette barfly doesn't suggest this background.

All the same, it's an endearing characterization. Wahlberg blurts out his newfound spiritual insights with the cocksure authority of an eternally passionate novice; he's like an acquaintance that makes you roll your eyes and smile at the same time when you see him coming. Ruiz is lovely as Carmen, and Malcolm McDowell embraces his straight man role as a stuffy monsignor unable to discourage Stu. Taken on its own terms, as a peculiar, sweet yarn spun from truth, the movie is absorbing and engaging.

As for Gibson, he's rarely seemed happier; this movie puts him back in the world of masochistic hardcore fringe-Catholic body horror he so loves. His performance as Bill is potently baleful, and there's a startling moment in which he quips that Stu wanting to become a priest is like "Hitler wanting to join the ADL." That's a nervy and heavy-handed "meta" joke to put in that guy's mouth. After all, it works almost as well to say that it's like Mel Gibson wanting to join the ADL.