Celebrity, as we're constantly being told by those unfortunate enough to achieve it, is an awful burden. "Fame sucks," sigh our poor, stressed-out celebs. And the more famous you are, the higher the price you're likely to pay.
If we choose to accept this new math of the rich and the famous, it stands to reason that movie stars — those most powerful and pitiful of pop icons, responsible for the happiness of so many millions of strangers — have the heaviest cross to bear.
Maybe this helps explain, if only just a little, why so many Hollywood actors are drawn to projects where they can be nailed up to the nearest cross, super-sized into full-blown martyrs and, as in the case of the new Kevin Costner movie, The Guardian, allowed to portray characters who suffer silently, nobly and pretty much near-endlessly "so that others may live."
Costner, whose messianic complex approaches Mel Gibson-esque proportions in The Guardian, stars as Ben Randall, a highly decorated Coast Guard rescue swimmer who's saved so many poor, waterlogged souls, he's lost count. Actually, Costner's character is such a noble, selfless sort that he's never really paid any attention to the record-breaking number of people he's saved. On the other hand, Ben can give you an exact accounting of a far less glamorous statistic — the number of people he's failed to save — and it's that marker that keeps our long-suffering hero so eternally vigilant and so eternally tormented.
Just in case there's any doubt about what's going on here or where the movie is headed, The Guardian begins with an off-screen narrator setting the stage by telling us about some mystical redeemer who lives beneath the waves — a "fisher of men," we're told, whose fate it is to be "the last hope of all who have been left behind." It's only a legend, the voiceover assures us (the words are repeated at the movie's end, just in case we weren't paying attention), but The Guardian makes it excruciatingly clear that it's referring to no one other than Costner's character, a force of nature who's scooping humans out of the deep within the film's first minutes.
"I'm a Coast Guard rescue swimmer," shouts Ben to a flailing individual in an early scene, "and I'm here to help you!" It's the first of many times we'll hear him repeat those exact words to some hapless human-in-distress, and you may well find yourself suppressing a giggle when you hear the line. It's a safe bet that these are the exact words demanded by standard Coast Guard protocol, but the literalness of the statement (delivered so that a particularly clueless 4-year-old would understand), combined with its constant repetition, can't help but remind us of one of those intentionally stupid catch phrases that wind up featured in skits on Saturday Night Live.
Those giggles become even harder to suppress, what with The Guardian frequently signifying instances of high emotion by letting scenes play out in a dated slow motion that aims for poetry but unintentionally milks the moment for Baywatch-ian kitsch. (If Costner weren't encased in a wetsuit much of the time, we'd almost certainly have to contend with the spectacle of pecs jiggling in slo-mo.) On the bright side, if this sort of overkill sounds appealing to you, you're in for a treat: There's more to come.
In any event, just like Jesus, Spider-Man and 007, Costner's character is apparently too busy saving the world to keep a Significant Other happy, and so Ben returns home one day to find his neglected wife in the process of packing up and moving out. "Guess it's time for me to rescue myself," says Ben philosophically, a decision that's cemented when, just a few scenes later, a monumental tragedy wipes out the poor guy's entire crew — a necessary development in movies like this, where some catastrophic event early in the film creates a crisis of confidence with which the hero must deal for the rest of the movie and, in all likelihood, eventually overcome.
And so, riddled with guilt and gloomier than ever, Ben is relieved of active duty and winds up teaching at an elite Coast Guard school where he trains the next generation of rescue swimmers and where the bulk of The Guardian takes place. The trainees are a remarkably faceless lot — but then again, the whole movie is pretty faceless, too, populated almost exclusively by nameless, generic characters distinguishable mainly because the actors are recognizable from various TV shows. ("Hey there's the black guy from West Wing! Look, there's the evil preacher from Carnivale!")
The one character who does stand out, however, and who the writers bother to name, is Jake Fisher (another future "fisher of men," perhaps?), a young, hot-shot rookie played by Ashton Kutcher. To practically no one's surprise, Kutcher's and Costner's characters immediately get into a major, ongoing pissing contest, a mano-a-mano made all the more personal because, as every last person in the audience will realize from the get-go, the promising, proud student and the grizzled, tough-love teacher are basically birds of a feather. There's some torch passing in store here, and in whose hands that torch winds up won't likely be much of a secret.
Ben reserves most of his browbeating (and veiled affection) for Jake, but he drives the rest of the rookies awfully hard, too, and a goodly portion of The Guardian is devoted to montages of Costner's character putting the recruits through their paces at what amounts to aquatic boot camp. We get montage after montage of swimmers struggling to be the best that they can be, engaging in insanely grueling activity such as wading in icy bodies of water or dragging concrete blocks across the bottoms of pools, all set to wannabe rock anthems straight out of Team America: World Police. Interspersed are a handful of obligatory "human interest" scenes (a lonely Ben telephoning his ex in the middle of the night; Jake making a love connection with a local). But every time we're within range of becoming involved in the film, another one of those damned montages pops up.
And at a running time of well over two hours, that's a lot of montages. There's nothing flat-out offensive about The Guardian, but the film has the undistinguished, by-the-numbers feel of a made-for-TV movie, and it comes as something of a shock that a competent action-specialist like Andrew Davis (The Fugitive) directed it. As for the leads, arguably two of the most wooden actors alive, the news is slightly less bad: Kutcher turns out to be such a useless lump that he winds up making Costner look surprisingly good by comparison.
It's worth noting, then, that there are worse fates than watching Kevin Costner as he swims around saving lives in The Guardian. It's just too bad he couldn't save his own movie.
This article appears in Sep 27 – Oct 4, 2006.