She is "beloved" by her fellow Americans, as all first ladies of course are, with the possible exception of Nancy Reagan. But in private she's a real piece of work: Demanding, stubborn, sarcastic, able to get under the skin and find the weak points. Chesnic has been assigned to her for a tour of three years, and when his tour is up he requests a change of scenery. She doesn't agree.
Chesnic is played by Nicholas Cage, who is able to imply a mind-set. This is a professional who knows his job, does it well, is proud, and resents having to perform little domestic chores for his client. But he is vulnerable to her; she has an unerring instinct about which buttons to push, and how far to go.
Tess is played by Shirley MacLaine. I hope she will think it a compliment that I have never seen her in a role that I sense is closer to herself. I've interviewed her many times, and I know that trick she has of looking intently at you, and making an intuitive remark designed to penetrate your defenses, and then asking a pointed question and waiting patiently for an answer that is usually not easy to provide.
Here she creates Tess Carlisle as a woman who once had the world as her stage, and now operates out of an upstairs bedroom in a comfortable farmhouse in Ohio. She is not elderly, or weak, or unintelligent, but she is lonely: During the film we see no friends, and her only relationships seem to be with her Service Service guards, her cooks, her secretary, her chauffeur and other employees.
Accustomed to having power on a vast scale, she now micromanages every detail of her shrunken realm. When Doug plucks the rose on her breakfast tray to wear in his lapel, she notices it immediately, and demands her rose back.
Worse, she complains about the rose thievery in a telephone call to the current president, who sounds a lot like Bill Clinton and provides many of the movie's best moments in his anguished return calls to Agent Chesnic ("Goddamnit, Doug, I'm supposed to be handling the problems of the free world here, and I'm dealing with a Secret Serviceman who's stealing flowers from a little old lady.") When Tess learns that Doug has requested reassignment after his three years with her, she takes care of that with a call to the president, too, and Doug is back on the farm in Ohio.
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