Spotlight

Spotlight Date: 5-October-08
Spoiler Rating: Low

Guarding Tess (1994)

Guarding Tess was billed as a comedy, and for years I looked at it with mild curiosity then passed it over for something else. The premise — a young Secret Service agent clashes with the elderly former First Lady he is assigned to protect — unpleasantly suggested tough guy clichés and gags involving geriatric undergarments. Yet I am glad that I decided to rent it at last. Guarding Tess is not an out-and-out comedy and makes no mention of incontinence. If I had to sum it up in a word or two I would call it a love story, albeit it a wonderfully unusual one.

First Lady Tess Carlisle and Agent-in-Charge Doug Chesnic are played by Shirley MacLaine and Nicolas Cage, personable actors who share the chemistry to make such a movie work. The screenplay offers minimal background on both, just enough to indicate why they react to each other as they do. She is alone (her husband dead and children estranged from her), frightened by mortality, and annoyed at having to suffer loneliness amid a crowd of strangers who won't let her out of their sight. Doug longs to be reassigned to a stint that could advance the career around which he has built his life. It is difficult to maintain the rigor and professionalism he believes in when stuck in an Ohio suburb and relegated to tasks like delivering a breakfast tray. Bothered by their respective predicaments, each grates on the other's nerves and instigates psychological skirmishes meant to assert his or her authority.

For all this, Tess and Doug are quite fond of each other. The genesis of this attachment occurs before the movie begins, so a viewer must imagine that she recognized and approved his upright nature while he understood and sympathized with her pampered isolation. True, the reason why he doesn't hightail it out of Ohio is because she sics the current president on him, placing him under obligations he cannot refuse. Still, his desire to leave entails some disappointment at their hostilities, a desire to part on terms of mutual respect before one of them says something they might regret. When the easygoing course of the film gives way to a dramatic finale, there is no mistaking that Doug's dedication contains a good deal of the personal.

Guarding Tess has its funny moments, like when two agents discuss who would win a boxing match between Mrs. Carlisle and Nancy Reagan. Essentially, though, it is one of those unexpected-encounter stories that I enjoy, a shared chapter from the diverse lives of two strong characters who connect in a moving way.

Copyright © 2008 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.