The Guardian

You know, I was expecting a complete disaster from William Friedkin’s The Guardian. All of the ratings everywhere are low. It’s mostly forgotten. It sounds silly. And yet…it’s competent. I mean, it’s not good, denying any sense of mystery that kills any tension across the bulk of the film, its chief flaw, but Friedkin knew how to put together a movie even if the script (which he apparently did the final draft on himself) is simply not good enough to actually hold dramatic interest across its rather short running time of about 90 minutes. I mean, it’s still mostly kind of dull, but then…whew…those last five minutes.

Phil (Dwier Brown) and Kate (Carey Lowell) are a married couple moving to Los Angeles from Chicago for Phil’s job as a photographer…or something. His job isn’t important. What’s important is that she’s pregnant, gives birth, and the three live in the house designed by one of their neighbors, Ned (Brad Hall), while they decide that they need a nanny so that Kate can go back to work. Now, where this film fails from a mystery and thrills point of view is from the very start. There’s actually a prologue that shows a nanny in silhouette, without showing her face, with another family, stealing their baby and giving it to a mysterious tree, complete with magic taking the baby and making it part of the tree. Don’t get me wrong, the sequence itself is pretty good, but there’s now, from the very first scene, no question about whether the central nanny, whoever she turns out to be, is magical and malevolent.

So, the only other mystery that there could be would be who is the mysterious shadowed nanny? Could it be one of the first three nannies interviewed that don’t get hired or could it be the one that does come on to work for the couple? Does the fact that Phil and Kate decide on one nanny who mysteriously gets thrown from her bike on the way to the first day of work, incapacitating her, leading to the hiring of Camilla (Jenny Seagrove) make it more or less mysterious? I mean, come on. This is about twenty minutes in, and we know that the magical druid stuff is real and that Camilla is the nanny from the prologue. There is no mystery anymore. There is no tension. This is the central source of the film’s general dullness.

Because, honestly, not much else happens. It’s Phil and Kate getting to know Camilla without any question of there being anything wrong, some small sexual tension between Phil and Camilla that manifests in a dream that may or may not be a dream, and Ned hitting on Camilla without any success.

Oh, one may be thinking, surely the film at least tries to play up the mystery of whether Camilla is the druid nanny from the prologue, right? Nope. Less than half an hour into the movie, she’s out in a field with the baby when she’s accosted by three men whom she leads to the mysterious tree. We watch the tree come alive and kill all three.

Supposedly, the source of all of this was the producer, Joe Wizan, insisting that a movie about a nanny obsessed with someone else’s baby couldn’t be a financial success. It had to be outright supernatural. This decision was made long before the hiring of Friedkin, back when Sam Raimi was still attached to direct, and Friedkin seems to have been brought in because he could simply pull things together and complete the job. (It should be noted that the ending is much more Raimi than Friedkin, including a shot that outright feels like homage to Raimi’s directing style.) So, a producer insisted on decisions that made no creative or narrative sense. Not a huge surprise, I guess.

Anyway, the film’s bulk is really a series of individual moments that don’t really build to anything but kind of work on their own. Ned’s story ends with a quite good and tense sequence of being chased by dogs. It just doesn’t build anything much in the rest of the film, only really providing information to Phil (a fair bit later) that the audience figured out at least half an hour before. When Phil finally decides to fight back, it’s something of an anticlimax because he’s a man, Camilla’s a woman, and the physical difference isn’t exactly a small factor, getting away easily. The film’s finale is broken into two with the first half being curious, I think, and the kind of ending I would have expected overall.

And then, when it seems like everything is mysteriously good, the film goes full schlock. I mean, full schlock, and I loved every second of it. Sure, it only lasts five minutes, but holy crap is it fun schlock.

So, without the final five minutes, the movie is kind of a dull mystery without a mystery even though the film could have built it up a couple of different major ways. There’s not enough story without that mystery to justify the runtime, and it’s mostly just a well-filmed and kind of boring film. With the final five minutes, though, it’s all of that but ends with a real bang.

So, Friedkin essentially just managed the set, doing the best he could under the strictures from the producer that drove off Sam Raimi. It’s not really a wonder that he pretty much (completely never?) talked about the film afterwards. I do wonder if Raimi might have been able to make it more fully entertaining from beginning to end, though.

Rating: 2.5/4