[.ca] Guarding Tess (ISBN 0800135938)

From Amazon.com:
Nicolas Cage stars in this drama-comedy about a Secret Service agent unable to get out of his assignment watching over an exasperating former first lady (Shirley MacLaine). The two get along like oil and water, but when MacLaine's bored widow ends up kidnapped, Cage's agent becomes a determined avenger. While the pairing of these two actors in a movie isn't something most audiences would ever have considered, that's what makes it so much fun. Cage and MacLaine are brilliantly focused in their respective parts, and filmmaker Hugh Wilson brings an unusually solid and urgent feeling to a story that might have become a dismissible light comedy in another director's hands. The DVD release has optional full-screen and widescreen presentations, theatrical trailer, optional Spanish and French soundtracks, and subtitles. --Tom Keogh

Wonderful character story:
This is the film that made me like Nicolas Cage. He and Maclaine are terrific as the protector and retired First Lady who must maintain a working relationship despite their opposing views. Lots of amusing character revelations, and an increasingly absorbing pace. I watched the ending again and again because I liked it so much.

Unexpected gem...:
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.

TBS Superstation.:
I just watched the second half of Guarding Tess on TBS. It's now 11:30PM, and I am writing this review when I should be in bed 1 and half hour ago. Nicolas Cade and The old woman in the movie both turned in great performances. The story was lightly funny at first, but didn't really go anywhere. The relationship between The FBI agent and ex-first lady was strange, and though the movie tried to give their intimacy an explanation, it was still weird. The climax came at the end, and was very entertaining, for it broke a long line of fairly boring plot. There is much meaning in the movie; it tried successfully to bring the emotions of a smart first lady widow who dearly wants attention to life. I was touched by the movie. Thank you. I should go to bed now.

Better Than Guarding The President's Dog:
Nicholas Cage stars as a Secret Service agent assigned to protect former first lady Shirley MacLaine. MacLaine has a difficult personality, and being guarded by Cage, a by-the-books man, causes a lot of friction between the two. She won't let him be reassigned, yet she seems bent on messing with him every chance she can get. It turns into one of those love-hate relationships that have fueled many a film, but this one works better than most. Cage and MacLaine are both excellent choices for their roles, giving the kind of quality performances you'd expect, with an unexpectedly good chemistry between them. I wish Cage would appear in more films like this, since I often find his choice of pictures puzzling. The rest of the cast takes a backseat to the star performances. The writing is good, allowing the relationship to develop naturally between the characters. I do wish there had been a few more laughs and that the ending had not come so quickly. I don't know if relationships develop between Secret Service agents and the people they are assigned to protect, so I don't know how realistic this was, but I really liked the characters, found the story amusing, and enjoyed the film a lot.

A delightful folie-a-deux between a guard and his First Lady:
"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 \osexual\c 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.