Past Misdeeds: The Guardian (1990)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

Chicago Marketing guy Phil (Dwier Brown) and his interior architect wife Kate (Carey Lowell) are on their way up, living the bourgeois dream, such as it is. Phil has just scored a choice new position in Los Angeles, and Kate's pregnant with their first child.

The couple's son Jake is born shortly after they move to LA into a fine house in some kind of comparatively rural looking suburb (any LA experts reading this may hit me, if necessary), and now they're looking for a nanny to take care of the child while Phil's out marketinging (that's the technical term) and Kate decorates interiors. They find a British woman named Camilla (Jenny Seagrove) who seems perfectly suited to the job. Camilla's not even the couple's first choice, but their initial candidate (Theresa Randle) dies in a curious and unfortunate accident.

Outwardly, things go well with Camilla. In truth, strangeness enters the house with her: Phil feels attracted to her in a way that - to his honour - rather seems to creep him out, and he begins to develop insomnia and peculiar dreams circling around babies, a tree and Camilla. Which is only fitting, seeing as Camilla is an evil tree spirit's supernatural druid guardian out to offer little Jake to her tree, like she did many times before with other babies. These generally unspoken of dangers of parenthood really are enough to disabuse one of the thought of ever having children of one's own.

For my tastes, William Friedkin's The Guardian has a reputation among many horror film fans that is decidedly too low. I believe it's The Exorcist's fault. That certified classic is generally seen as the best of the director's few horror films, if not as his best film, period, and any other genre film he directed always will have to compete with it; which is of course patently unfair, but then such is life. To me, The Exorcist never mattered much. I can appreciate the film as a technical achievement but I have no emotional connection to its plot, nor do I find it particularly interesting or frightening, so I'm in a great position to not judge a movie for not being The Exorcist.

However, The Guardian has to jump a different hurdle with me, for it belongs to that dreaded group of movies from the late 80s and early 90s that shows educated rich people living the good life getting betrayed (and hopefully murdered) by the hired help who never heard of the sanctity of family and so on and so forth. I do enjoy some films in this particular sub-genre, but in general, I find its mixture of classism and reactionary thought particularly distasteful.

In this particular case, there's not too much for me to hate about the film's politics, though. Friedkin's approach doesn't seem interested in class as a concept at all, and doesn't do much of the "sacred family" nonsense either; we are rather in the "most parents want to protect their babies" territory that is as innocent as these things go. Additionally, it is rather difficult to feel any actual loathing towards this film's rich couple, or get annoyed at them, for Phil and Kate may be two of the blandest people alive, barely showing themselves able to scratch together enough character traits of any kind for even one person between the two of them. They're also the kind of people progressive enough to hire a nanny who is as coldly creepy as Seagrove's Camilla, so they may be difficult to love but they're not the kind of horror film main characters I'd enjoy seeing suffer.

All this - and I haven't even mentioned how uninspired the film's plotting is - rather sounds as if I am actually sharing the general opinion about The Guardian, but there's one major thing the film does so very well I feel bound to forgive it for any and all flaws it has. The film does weird (or even Weird) just wonderfully right, treating Camilla as a force from an Outside that opens doors to that Outside for everyone she touches. Plus, there's even the suggestion of tree sex.

Where too many US mainstream horror movies (then and now) absolutely try to avoid anything supernatural that can't be systematized and explained, Friedkin's film – I very much suspect thanks to its very British screenwriter, the great Stephen Volk - is very much in the spirit of European horror, thriving on certain elements being illogical, treating its supernatural threat as something turning the rational, sunny world of its protagonists into something stranger and more ambiguous.

Friedkin (and Volk) particularly use images and ideas out of fairy tale and myth here - from the wolf pack that protects the tree and Camilla, to the doom of our heroes' architect neighbour beginning with him watching Camilla bathing in a brook in the woods. The woods themselves (are there even such woods in real-world LA?) do of course belong into the realm of the same kind of imagery, particularly the way even a small detour from a road leads the film's characters from civilization and the rational world they know into the realm of nightmare and fairy-tale.


To use this kind of approach to horror in a film does naturally carry some specific risks beyond just annoying the people who like their attacks of the irrational on the rational more logical. It is, in particular, very easy to land in the realm of the unintentionally funny when one goes for the capital-W Weird. The Guardian's climax with its body painted Camilla with an effects-laden voice, and its heroic fight against a bleeding tree is probably a moment where a lot of people will start to giggle or roll their eyes, and I really can't blame anyone for that; I, on the other hand, am much too delighted by a film actually going to such a peculiar place in its finale to laugh at it

On Exploder Button: The Guardian (1990)

As one of the few horror movie fans generally unaffected by The Exorcist I find myself in the curious position to regard William Friedkin's much less well loved The Guardian quite a bit more highly.

It is, after all, a very European-style bit of horror, and that's the sort of thing I do enjoy the most in the genre. My column on Exploder Button discloses the horrible facts about my taste.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,william friedkin,horror,jenny seagrove,dwier brown,carey lowell,other places

Three Films Make A Post: Jet-hot action! Jet-hot suspense! Jet-hot thrills!

The Expatriate (2012): Philipp Stölzl's film about a former CIA operative (Aaron Eckhart) getting into trouble with an international conspiracy that includes his former handler (Olga Kurylenko) and threatens to cost the life of his daughter (Liana Liberato) is a neat example of the modern international (producing countries are the USA, Canada, Belgium and the UK, the director is German, and the actors are coming from everywhere) spy thriller. It's not a film that hits many surprising beats but it tells its story well, with the proper amount of violence and one of the more convincing variations on the "daughter and father come together through the father's talent for lethal violence" theme. Plus, the acting's more than decent and in the Europe of this film - quite unlike in that of Europa Corps. movies - brown people aren't automatically evil.

Killer Joe (2011): This is one of those cases where I absolutely understand the wave of approval a film and its director (in this case a William Friedkin absolutely not willing to coast on previous achievements or attempt to copy them) are met with, see the artistic value and the plain effort in every shot, yet still, when it comes down to it, can't get excited about the film in the slightest, and even feel rather annoyed by it. Large part of the reason for that might be an ending that works wonderfully on a subtextual level, less so as the tour de force where blackest comedy and violence meet I think it's supposed to be, and makes little sense when you try and see the characters as people. And here comes the other, much heavier, problem I have with Killer Joe into play - I have my doubts it sees the uneducated Southern poor it concerns itself with as actual people instead of as objects it can slyly look down on as so stupid and alien they deserve whatever shit is coming to them; at the very least, the film lacks any kind of sympathy with its characters, and without that sympathy, I don't really see a reason to care about a film be it as artful as it may.

Seven Psychopaths (2012): Yet another movie I'm not as in love with as I'm probably supposed to, even though it is full of things I love in my movies: Christopher Walken, Sam Rockwell, meta, the subversion of genre standards, an excellent taste in music, shaggy dog stories and direction that thrives on details. Problem is, I like my subversion of genre tropes rather more subtle, or at least less self-congratulatory. Martin McDonagh's film loudly points out that it's subverting tropes right now about every ten minutes, instead of just doing it and trusting in the audience to understand what it's doing. There's something self-congratulatory and smug about this approach that rubs me the wrong way and really doesn't fit the actual charm and intelligence that the film's script shows when it's not patting itself on the back. Of course, this is also a film that loves to stop its critique halfway, pointing out the absence and uselessness of women in action etc. cinema but then not doing any better by its own female characters, so maybe I'm just expecting too much of it.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,canadian movies,american movies,belgian movies,spies,thriller,noir,comedy,philip stölzl,aaron eckhart,olga kurylenko,liana liberato,william friedkin,martin mcdonagh,christopher walken,sam rockwell