By Marc S. Sanders
Sam Elliott is Rick, the Lifeguard at a sunny Los Angeles beach in 1976. He’s handsome with his trademark mustache and bronze tan. He’s also in his early thirties and his parents as well as some friends think it’s time he moves on from his occupation into a more responsible and adult line of work. Even Rick considers the fact that perhaps it is time to finally come of age.
This film from director Daniel Petrie is nothing special or necessarily memorable. However, while I first thought it would be a wasteful story of just the various walks of life that peruse the beach, it turns out to be a personal story about a man well past the time when he should have transitioned into the next phase of his life.
Rick has been invited to his fifteenth-year high school reunion. It’s pretty telling when he enters the ballroom. Petrie does close ups of the other attendees who are all talking about their jobs, maybe their children and spouses as well, maybe even their divorces. Rick arrives in his gorgeous bachelor ride, a Corvette Stingray convertible, donning a leather jacket and a shirt unbuttoned to the middle of his chest. He’s a fish out of water with his former classmates, but he’s still admired and welcomed. He rekindles a romance with an old flame, Cathy (Anne Archer) who’s a successful art dealer, and he’s welcomed to get to know her young son. Cathy is ready to go the distance in a relationship with Rick.
At the same time, Rick is trying to hold on to his youth of a bygone time. He warns his new, college age lifeguard partner, Chris (Parker Stevenson), not to get involved with a cute and precocious seventeen-year-old kid named Wendy (Kathleen Quinlan). Wendy has her eye on Rick though, and for a moment he returns to when the beach and the surf were once new to him, and he welcomes her invitation for an evening of lovemaking. Later, as Rick becomes more aware of people his own age doing more appropriate activities for his generation, does it become a challenge for him to reject Wendy’s ongoing attention.
The legalities and morals of Rick’s involvement with an underage girl are approached but the movie doesn’t delve much deeper than that. It’s a film of its time, made in the mid-1970s. I thought of movies like Little Darlings and even the original Meatballs when the drama focused on the internal struggle of some of its main characters.
Lifeguard starts out episodic as it shows the shenanigans of its beachgoers. Rick and Chris laugh as two goofballs manage to strip a bikini top of a young blond. They also fend off a couple of potheads picking on a teen regular. They deal with a perverted flasher. Then the movie improves as it gets personal with Elliott’s character and his performance.
Rick is the guy that everyone looks up to, but he’s human and he can even falter on a team relay race, gasping for breath that just won’t come as he sprints out of the water. This is a good moment in the film. Rick is desperately trying to catch his breath and young Wendy is looking right at him trying to see if he’s okay. Rick’s youth is speaking directly to himself fifteen years later.
He’s encouraged by a classmate to become a Porsche car salesman where he could make good money. A good dinner table scene with his parents also occurs when he’s pointedly told to grow up. I remember a couple of conversations like that with my father. The question is who does Rick have to grow up for, himself or those around him? At the same time, he’s a very responsible and good lifeguard, and he reminds us that being a lifeguard is also about being a literal life saver.
I appreciate the conclusion to the film. It’s more realistic and grounded than other movies might have offered with similar themes. Framed around acoustic guitar and vocals from Paul Williams, Daniel Petrie allows moments of silence for Rick to contemplate and think while gazing at a sun soaked beach and ocean, not talking with anyone about what his next step in life should be. Don’t we all do that, where we just sit and think, pondering the possibilities of various outcomes for ourselves?
Lifeguard may be outdated, nearly fifty years after it was filmed, but it is an honest account of a guy who may be content with his current state, even if he’s not ready to consider what’s to come as he continues to age.
2 UNPAID MOVIE CRITICS!!!! 