The Travolta/Cage Project #38 Guarding Tess (1994)

The 1994 comedy-drama Guarding Tess opens with something we’ve seen infrequently over the course of our leisurely ramble through the complete filmography of Nicolas Cage: the Face/Off star in a suit. Cage’s Secret Service Agent Doug Chesnic is so proper and upright that even when he’s naked in the shower he’s metaphorically wearing a suit. A freshly pressed suit is not just attire for Doug: it’s who he is, on the inside as well as the outside. 

Guarding Tess boldly casts one of American film’s great lunatics, fresh off his career-defining performance as crazy man Eddie King in Deadfall as an uptight square who lives his life by the book and is frustrated to the point of apoplexy by people who do not. 

Writer-director Hugh Wilson’s comedy-drama makes other unexpected but inspired choices as well. Most films about the complicated, tense but ultimately loving bond between an emotionally rigid secret service agent and the tart, sly former First Lady he’s cursed with having to protect at the very beginning of their story, with the secret service agent interviewing for the job or meeting the First Lady for the first first time. 

Not Guarding Tess. Instead WKRP and Famous Teddy Z creator Wilson’s movie begins at what could be the end. We open with Doug overjoyed that he’s finally going to be able to leave a Secret Service gig as a glorified gofer/assistant to prickly former First Lady Tess Carlisle (Shirley MacLaine) after three endless years for a position more in line with his ambitions to travel the world saving world leaders from assassination. 

Doug’s happiness is short-lived, however. Despite her seeming disdain for Doug and his buttoned-up ways, Tess asks for his assignment to be extended. No less of an authority than the President of the United States crankily intervenes to let the dedicated agent know that Tess may be a colossal pain in the ass, but she’s also a beloved public figure whose late husband played a central role in his own career so one of the stranger responsibilities of his presidency entails making sure Tess gets what she wants, when she wants in. 

So Doug is dragged unhappily back into the professional purgatory of attending to the endless needs and myriad eccentricities of a headstrong boss who ignores the rules Doug prides himself on following. 

Tess sucks the unwilling apogee of rugged, stoic masculinity back into her sphere because she’s lonely and bored but also because she knows Doug, and knows that he is, if anything, possibly too good at his job, and doesn’t want to have to go through the bother of learning how to push the buttons of a new agent. 

Cage proves a surprisingly hilarious straight man here. We learn next to nothing about his character except that he was briefly married at one point and his life have been devoted to public service but we do not need exposition in order to understand him and his world. Doug’s tightly coiled body language, aggressive, even provocative formality and air of barely concealed rage tell us everything that we need to know about him and how he sees the world and his role in it. 

Professionalism is Doug’s religion and his boss is a proud heretic. Tess loves needling Doug and the other secret service agents to get a reaction but in her own curious way the beloved former first lady takes her job very seriously even if that position is a lot more nebulous. 

When our cantankerous heroine meets her adoring public it is as if a switch goes on inside her and she becomes what society and her curious station in her life angrily demand her to be: a grandmotherly old lady who represents her husband in his death even more than she did in his eventful lifetime. 

Being the first lady is a role. It’s one that Tess executes beautifully in public as if it were her true, immutable self when it really represents her at her artificial best, airbrushed and prettified to a state of impossible perfection. 

The real Tess lies somewhere between the facade of grandmotherly grace she adopts for the cameras and the mean old lady pushing around her long-suffering staff because it amuses her to do so and she sadly has nothing better to do. 

Throughout Guarding Tess’ funny, smart and beautifully acted first hour I found myself wondering why a movie with such wonderful performances, great characters and complex, nuanced relationships didn’t enjoy a better critical or popular reputation. I wondered why it was half-forgotten where a similarly rock-solid Cage movie like Honeymoon in Vegas is very fondly remembered. 

Then I learned the answer. Honeymoon in Vegas is semi-beloved in no small part because it absolutely nails the landing with its rightly revered Flying Elvises set-piece. Guarding Tess, in sharp contrast, goes horribly awry in a third act that trades in deftly conceived and executed comedy of awkwardness, humane drama and wonderful chemistry/tension for generic thriller heroics when Tess is kidnapped on Doug’s watch. 

In a deeply disappointing final act Guarding Tess perversely and deliberately chooses to toss out just about everything that made it special. Love MacLaine’s funny, warm, cantankerous, vinegary, sad, deeply lived-in and Golden Globe-nominated lead performance? Well, tough luck because when Tess is kidnapped MacLaine disappears from the screen for a good twenty to twenty five minutes. 

Dig the crackling comic tension between Cage and MacLaine, Academy Award-winning living legends who bring out the best in each other and create a central dynamic that’s funny and layered, not to mention real and multi-dimensional? Tough luck, because once the former first lady gets kidnapped by one of her own employees the two are pointlessly and disastrously separated until pretty much the end of the film. 

Enjoy the crackling comedy of Cage and MacLaine’s wonderfully peppery dynamic? Too bad, because in its third act Guarding Tess largely and foolishly chooses to eschew comedy altogether for the sake of a boilerplate kidnapping subplot. Pleasantly surprised by the film’s second act shift towards drama as Doug comes to understand and appreciate his boss as a complicated woman with a lot of goodness in her, not just a mean old lady who takes malicious delight in emasculating him? You’re once again out of luck because when Guarding Tess regrettably decides to become the kind of thriller where an obsessed lawman who has gotten way too personally involved in the case of a lifetime brazenly breaks the rules and the law in order to get his man, it really commits to that near-fatal error. 

Cage is so convincing as a by the book secret service agent who prizes professionalism and dedication to duty above all else that when he starts breaking all the rules in order to save a boss he now loves and appreciates it feels like a terrible betrayal of Cage, the character and the film. 

The idea is that Doug has become so emotionally attached to Tess that he’s willing to throw out all he holds dear and become a crazed renegade willing to commit crimes for the sake of preventing  bigger ones but this unfortunate embrace of lazy, hack thriller cliches can’t help but come as a crushing let-down after the nuanced, character-based comedy and drama of the film’s wildly superior first two acts. 

In its woeful final act Guarding Tess gives us a dispiriting glimpse into a future where dreary, forgettable Nicolas Cage thrillers where the beloved icon runs around wild-eyed and desperate while waving a gun at the bad guys are the rule rather than the exception.

Guarding Tess is frustrating because there’s so much about it that is not just good but borderline great, most notably Cage and MacLaine’s wonderful performances and explosive comic chemistry. Yet it takes such a dramatic wrong turn an hour in that it can be hard to recommend it unreservedly, or even at all.

Still, if you’re a Nicolas Cage, which you almost undoubtedly are if you’re reading this article, then Guarding Tess is worth watching for Cage’s terrific, uncharacteristically understated performance alone.

Cage and MacLaine apparently hit it off in real life as well, bonding over their shared love of animals and slight eccentricities. The co-stars even apparently co-adopted a ferret and a zebra named Mr. Zed together. 

I maddeningly cannot find images of Cage and MacLaine with their pet zebra (#FirstWorldProblems), but if Guarding Tess had ended with outtakes of its stars cavorting with animals I would have no problem heartily recommending it. 

Alas, failing to harness the power and adorability of Nicolas Cage and Shirley MacLaine romping about with their zebra represents just one blown opportunity in a film full of them. 

Help ensure a future for the Happy Place during an uncertain era AND get sweet merch by pledging to the site’s Patreon account at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace

Also, BUY the RIDICULOUSLY SELF-INDULGENT, ILL-ADVISED VANITY EDITION of  THE WEIRD ACCORDION TO AL, the Happy Place’s first book. This 500 page extended edition features an introduction from Al himself (who I co-wrote 2012’s Weird Al: The Book with), who also copy-edited and fact-checked, as well as over 80 illustrations from Felipe Sobreiro on entries covering every facet of Al’s career, including his complete discography, The Compleat Al, UHF, the 2018 tour that gives the book its subtitle and EVERY episode of The Weird Al Show and Al’s season as the band-leader on Comedy Bang! Bang! 

Only 23 dollars signed, tax and shipping included, at the https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop or for more, unsigned, from Amazon here