Here's how you look when you're Susan Sarandon and you're at the opening-night party for your new gals-with-guns-on-the-road movie, Thelma & Louise, and you're 44 years old and the mother of two and you're known for your smoky sexuality, which, at least in Hollywood, is considered a Breakthrough for Older Women and a sign of hope for first wives everywhere:You wear a low-cut, check-out-the-breasts tank top and a narrow check-out-the-legs miniskirt and a funky jacket embroidered with vaguely Southwest motifs. And cowboy boots. You flash your big Bette Davis eyes and toss your tousled auburn hair and knock out a few happy hoedown kicks. You goof in an affectionate, sisterhood-is- powerful way with your swanny kid-sister of a costar, Geena Davis. You noodle your live-in sweetie, Bull Durham costar Tim Robbins. And when journalists stick tape recorders under your nose and ask you, ''Will this movie change Hollywood's attitude toward women as big box office draws?'' you answer, ''Nope.'' Or ''No way.'' Or something equally hard- boiled-something that shows you know the limits of sexual equality in an industry where Out of Africa was considered Robert Redford's movie, not Meryl Streep's. Then you smile. And you turn your remarkable high beams on everyone who approaches, causing folks to fall back and ogle and say, Wow. This babe owns the road. Susan Sarandon is at the wheel in Thelma & Louise all right-in a metallic green ragtop '66 T-bird, to be exact. As Louise, the waitress with the neat beehive hairdo whose take-charge competence hides a secret mess in her past, Sarandon is in the driver's seat for much of the journey, whipping over long ribbons of road through spectacular Southwestern landscapes. Set-ting off on a girls-only weekend with her best friend, Thelma-a cowed and complaisant housewife with an apoplectic bully for a husband-Louise sets the duo on an irrevocable path when Thelma is nearly raped. She kills the guy with Thelma's gun, in a white-hot moment of icy fury. Pretty soon the two are outlaws on the run, hurtling toward fate in the middle of the desert. Feminist trip? Existential car ride? You decide. Some trend scouts are lumping Thelma & Louise with Mortal Thoughts, Sleeping With the Enemy, and even Switch, arguing a case for the latest genre in the humorless '90s: the man-hating revenge movie. Then again, there's nothing to stop the less manifesto-minded from enjoying Thelma & Louise as just a grand cartoon saga about a coupla white chicks drivin' around shootin'. In fact, the line on T&L should be this: 1) Women's real emotions (which include real, uncute anger) are at least being explored, however clunkily, in today's mainstream Hollywood. 2) Susan Sarandon, who established herself early in her career as a sexy lightweight, has chosen another complex, difficult, interesting character for her newest movie. 3) The actress has managed to combine motherhood (unwed), political activism (liberal), and sexuality (ripe) into an impres-sive substantiveness that serves her-and her audience-well. In other words, Sarandon owns her own winding road. Which she is happy to describe. A driven talker, she is likely to leap from the topic of Hollywood to racism and ''self-determination for countries of color.'' She is prone to turn conversation about her new movie into a treatise about media coverage of the gulf war. And the loneliness of her political passions. And why she went to Nicaragua in '84. ''I brought baby food and milk through a friendship organization called MADRE, and if that makes me a communist then people are just so uneducated, and I don't apologize for it.'' She is likely to mention homelessness and pro-choice issues and her pride in being an American. She is apt to get operatic the way people do when they're defending the seriousness of their political involvement. And facts are slippery. And nothing is clear. Lord knows, Susan Sarandon is Right Out There. But she is also graceful in her transitions. So pretty soon she's talking about her life and career and Thelma & Lou-ise again. ''My job in the mov-ie was to literally and figuratively drive the film,'' she says. ''I was responsible for the moral underpinning. And I had some fears about the project. I was afraid the movie could turn into some kind of revenge film and some kind of feeding frenzy of violence against men, which would not only be a tired idea but certainly something I wouldn't be interested in pursuing.'' Sarandon brought her misgivings to costar Davis and director Ridley Scott (Alien, Black Rain). ''Ridley hasn't been known for his character development or for being an actor's director,'' says Sarandon, ''so I thought it was necessary for us to agree about what this was about and what the traps would be, to try to find a way to make this a morally responsible film. The way I work, I tend to be pretty stream-of-consciousness in terms of suggestions. I don't expect them all to be taken. I don't believe there's a right way or a wrong way. But I think there's a way that works and a way that doesn't.'' Stream-of-consciously, she made the following suggestions: She asked to drop a long love scene with her boyfriend, played by Michael Madsen (''contrary to my reputation'') that she thought was inappropriate to her character. She suggest-ed adding some business in which Louise trades all her jewelry to an old man for his cowboy hat. And she suggested a stun-ning moment where she's driving while Thelma sleeps and she pulls the car over and stops- just stops-to get out and take in the extraordinary silence of the Southwestern night.
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