Customer Reviews

Guarding Tess

5 star:		(41)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

When "Guarding Tess" was released eight years ago, I ended up watching it in the theater because I was bored and because it looked a little more promising than the rest of the pack. That thought proved to be an understatement. To date, I have seen this movie at least eight times, and I tend to enjoy it more with each viewing. Nicholas Cage is perfect as the disgruntled Secret Service agent who feels he has been banished to his current duty -- namely, doting on a cantankerous former First Lady, played to the hilt by Shirley MacLaine. "Guarding Tess" is alternately funny and moving, and even includes a bit of a mystery for Cage to solve. Far more than a one-dimensional film, "Guarding Tess" is satisfying for so many reasons -- the witty script, the fine performances, the deft direction, and the mostly even pacing, to name a few. While you can catch this on a regular basis on TBS (which has made the movie one of its most reliable staples), "Guarding Tess" is definitely worth owning for more frequent viewing.

I really can't even remember what it was that I expected when I first saw ads for Guarding Tess. I definitely remember that it wasn't much. This film has so much heart and character that its impossible to resist.

Shirley McLaine (Tess Carlisle) is the former first lady of a now deceased president. Nicholas Cage (Doug Chesnik) is the head secret service agent assigned to 'guard' the former first lady. Tess is a rather crochety seemingly self absorbed old girl and agent Chesnik is a by the book G-man.

While Tess does her level best to break all the rules and drive Doug crazy, Doug yearns to be on a 'real' assignment. He hates the non structured nature of guarding someone like Tess.

What each of them realizes along the way is how much they care for one another and how much they bring to the others life.

And along the way we are introduced to an ecclectic group of characters who will endear themselves to your heart and have you chuckling at many of their antics.

You'll laugh, cry and feel for all the characters in this gem of a film.

So why only 4 stars then. Because despite its genuine warmth and humor I found the story to be a bit contrived and somewhat unbelievable.

All that notwithstanding it shouldn't be missed.

This is the first time that I thought a movie was not worth seeing and waited until it hit a premium movie channel. This time I will admit I made a mistake. This movie was fun to watch. It is well written and the interactions of the two main actors show a great chemistry.

Nicolas Cage plays the Special Agent in Charge of the Secret Service detail guarding a former First Lady. The First Lady is played well my Shirley MacLaine. The agent feels he is wasted in such a detail and wants desperately to get back on detail to the White House...and the First Lady wants him to stay. The two seem to thrive on confrontation with each other. She does her best to break every procedure the Secret Service is supposed to follow.

If you pay attention in the movie you will see why the First Lady actually loves the agent so much and wants him with her. And I think the picture shows us a very accurate relationship that occurs between agent and his protectee. Though it could be seen as a comedy; there is a just enough drama and a mystery which Cage character solves. A very well directed with perfect pace and timing. I look forward to buying it and watching it again.

"Guarding Tess" opens with a dapper and cheery Doug Chesnick (Nicholas Cage) fleeing a three-year stint as Special Agent in Charge, United States Secret Service, during which he was responsible for guarding a recently-widowed former First Lady (Shirley MacLaine) in her mansion in rural Ohio.

It's not only ditching the rusticity that puts a spring in Chesnick's step, but the opportunity to flee his employer, the authoritarian, aristocratic former First Lady, who has zeroed in on Chesnick while largely ignoring the rest of her staff. Her specialty, one quickly learns, is what the armed forces call the "psy-op" or, more simply, psychological warfare.

It is part of Tess Carlisle's modus operandi to let Chesnick believe that he is finally free, and waste to his time reporting to Washington for a new assignment. Chesnick yearns to join the elite who guard the President. Instead, in D.C., Chesnick is told that Carlisle already has called the President to request that Chesnick be reassigned to another three-year "tour", a tour of a truly martial sort.

The current President was the late President Carlisle's Veep, which permits Tess to continue to brusquely address him as the underling he always was to her. Tess's wish is the new President's command, not least because it was her private say that got him the winning Carlisle ticket.

In a fury, Chesnick is forced to return to Ohio. A kind of dance of death begins as Tess tries to break the spirit of the Special Agent in Charge, a title she cannot resist deconstructing, while Chesnick's fury mounts and he becomes all the more fanatical about adhering to the strictest (and most deadening) regulations of the Secret Service.

It is quickly apparent that Tess Carlisle is vastly too clever and even (almost secretly) high-minded to have summoned Chesnick as a dimwitted mouse to bat around, yet she sincerely loathes his fastidiousness about seatments in cars and the tedium of being followed and observed 24-7. There is no denying the emotional S&M the Tess and Chesnick mete out, but it is curiously bilateral. For reasons unexplained for much of the film, Tess cannot quite afford to have Chesnick quit (or actually quit, more precisely).

The power struggles that break out over her attempted use of agents as golf caddies and her recurring jailbreaks with a fearful chauffeur are as uproarious as they are petty.

When the humiliated Chesnick is forced "by regulation" to alert the local sheriff, for example, that Tess Carlisle and her driver have lost their detail yet again, the sheriff puts the brokenly dignified agent on speakerphone. The deputies snigger en masse when the Sheriff intones mockingly: "That Mrs. Carlisle sure is slippery...for a senior citizen and all." Formal as always, Chesnick does not permit himself so much as a note of sarcasm in his response. He communicates in rare tics and elaborate, furious pronunciations of basic instructions, but at no time does he debase his office.

Sure enough, Chesnick quits over his inability, courtesy of the eccentric, tantrum-throwing Tess, to do his job "properly" (read: perfectly). And, sure enough, Mrs. Carlisle has the new President on her speed dial.

The calls put through from the President, a snarling and barking Texan, are episodes of comic sublimity. Each time, Chesnick, like virtually anyone other than the formidable Mrs. Carlisle, freezes with terror when told via a sudden phone call to "hold for the President".

The disembodied voice, emanating variously from the Oval Office and from Air Force One, is an uncanny, flawless mimicry of LBJ. Johnson's private threats, manipulations and vaunted coarseness are preserved in an inimitable Texan patois which melds obscenity, patriotism, blackmail and phoney good-ole-boy charm.

The President is required, for example, to investigate Mrs. Carlisle's story that her agent "ripped up some flowers". Chesnick speaks carefully about the distinction between fact and fiction: it was only a single flower, and he merely snapped off the bud. Though the President is whipped by the retired Mrs. Carlisle, he is fully alert to the lunacy of how his time is being wasted. The solution? Fix it, Agent Chesnick, "or next time, you'll be guarding my dog, do you hear me son?"

When we learn at last of the origin of Tess Carlisle's fixation on Agent Chesnick, it is suitably poignant and ennobling. Rather than trying to break him, as it first appears, she is "merely" trying to get him to break the rules. We see Tess at her bullying worst and then her impossibly gracious best, in two very rare encounters with "her" public.

No less a figure than Barbara Bush is said to have told MacLaine that the film was a perfectly accurate rendition of the relationship between agent and protectee. It is very revealing that such a remark should have come from the Grand Dame, Mrs. Bush, who is usually described as being as vicious and petty in private as she is marvellously patrician in public.

The gun Chesnick is required to place on a table outside Mrs. Chesnick's room must go off, by the fifth act, according to the rules of drama. It does, and Chesnick's attention to detail is finally rewarded. Rather than "some sick [sexual] thing" going on, as the President earlier, hilariously, suggests, there is a courtly love which unfolds between Tess and her devoted agent which gives a final unity to this first comic, then poignant story.

Doug Chesnick, played by Nicolas Cage, is the secret service agent assigned to protect President Carlisle's widow Tess, played by Shirley MacLaine. He chafes at the unimportance of his assignment but he especially would like to get away from her! She's difficult, rude, arbitrary, and won't let them do their jobs effectively. But when his current assignment is over and he gladly returns to Washington, he is told he has to go back. Tess called the president and wants him to stay. It is an almost constant battle of wills between them, with Tess usually winning.

A key scene is of her wheeler-dealer businessman son (Edward Albert)coming to ask her to endorse a high-end golf club/housing development. He simply came there to use her. It is there in her face that she knows this, as she turns him down. Later, she is viewing video of television coverage of her husband's funeral, during which her son appears to be feeling nothing, while Doug's composure breaks. Brief, and covered quickly, but there's no doubt how he felt. Nicolas Cage is certainly a very good actor. We understand that Tess wants Doug close to her because he loved her husband and is the son she wished she had. Also, no one knows that she has an inoperable brain tumor and does not have long to live.

Suffice it to say that her affection for him is justified when she is kidnapped. To Doug's great professional humiliation, top agents descend from Washington and take control; but Doug, unlike anyone else in the agency, realizes almost at once who is responsible and stops at nothing to extract the information he needs to save Tess's life.

In the hands of two less-edgy actors it would probably be completely forgettable; but it works. Highly recommended.

This is one of the greatest movies I have watched. I know I have probably watched the movie twenty times in the past. It has heart and compassion. It is absolutely one of the best I have seen

This was a really great, heart-warming story. Nicolas Cage, as usual, played the part of Doug Chesnic beautifully. You can really feel his frustration at Tess Carlisle at the beginning of the movie. By the end, you realize that underneath that frustration, Chesnic really does care about Tess. The ending was great. Guarding Tess is one of those movies that leave a warm feeling in your heart. I think both Cage and MacLaine did a wonderful job.

Shirley MacLaine and Nicolas Cage are magic in this movie. Hugh Wilson deserves kudos for his excellent direction in this superior film. Nicolas Cage plays the part of an intelligent, aspiring Secret Service agent who thinks that he's completing his tour of duty with former First Lady Tess Carlisle, when, to his dismay, she's requested that he stay on permanent assignment. He tries on various occasions to sabotage his assignment through outrageous acts directed towards Tess, but the old political warhorse turns around every situation to her benefit, calling the President and complaining, to the point that the President is calling up Cage and chewing him out to get along with the "cagey" first lady. Underneath the friction are suble revelations that change the entire outlook of the movie. For instance, one begins to realize how much Cage cares for the former first lady's husband in a scene where she watches old videos of her husband's funeral when, spotted in the congregation, Cage is lowering his head to shed tears at the passing of the President. Further revelations unfold when Tess visits with her son that results in a very unsatisfactory, shallow encounter leaves her feeling a need to make a connection with someone who actually cares for her, and Agent Cheznic fulfills this need without even realizing it. Subtle, classy humor is the rule of the day, and Cage and MacLaine pull it off in style. The pace picks up towards the last half of the movie when the first lady is kidnapped, and Cage, through feelings of affection and guilt, turns up the heat on the situation and suspects to begin a frantic search. Watch carefully and watch again at the many subtle scenes and extremely excellent performances by this cast of gifted actors.

Never got tired watching it over and over and over again, same as Dave of similar genre!!!

That's the answer everyone gives Tess Carlisle (MacLaine) if they know what's good for them.

SAIC (that's Special Agent in Charge) Doug Chesnic wants to leave Tess' detail. He's been there three years and he wants to go back to Washington where the action is. Well, and besides, Tess Carlisle is driving him nuts.

He gets as far as the Director of the Secret Service's inner office only to be told that Mrs. Carlisle called the President and wants him back. What choice has he, but to go.

Doug thinks he's going to be tough on her, but the battle of wills between the two of them has none other than the President mediating when Tess can't win herself.

The film's a battle royale between two very strong-willed characters, but in the end when the chips are down, these two people take care of each other.

"Guarding Tess" is one of those surprise films that ends so well the bickering at the front's almost erased. It's just a good watch occasionally when you need to take some stress off.