Reality Bites in the Moral Maze of The Guardian

From:Sunday Telegraph
Date:7th,Dec 2003
By Sheryn George


The Guardian, a gritty series based on children's legal advocates and starring Simon Baker, opts for true-life resolutions rather than Hollywood's trite endings.

Nick Fallin, lawyer, works in hell. For those who haven't watched Ten's visceral moral thriller The Guardian, Fallin is serving 1500 hours of community service for a drug arrest. His punishment consists of using his legal smarts to protect children through the Children's Legal Service of Pittsburgh.

As a kind of “fallen” angel, Simon Baker's character has to negotiate his way through a never-ending moral quagmire in this under-funded area.

Even fans used to the claustrophobic and gritty atmosphere of this taut TV drama will find the new season's movie-length opener shocking. Fallin and his father, en route to a charity concert, beat up a man who takes their parking spot. The vicious father-son beating is another brave opener for the series that revels in showing us its characters' dark sides.

Baker, part of Australia's senior acting alumni, is in the right territory here. His expressive face conveys Nick's paradoxical character – this guy seems to want to do the right thing, but he gets caught in the moral cracks and shades of grey every time. And it's far more interesting watching a bad guy going good, than a good guy going bad.

“There is a longing to be a better person and lead a better, richer, fuller life. He's just not really capable of doing it,” Baker says of his character.

Dabney Coleman, as Nick's amoral lawyer father Burton Fallin, provides a great foil. In the third-season opener, Nick is dealing – in his repressed fashion – with the aftermath of a friend's death. Simultaneously, his relationship is floundering; and he is working on a custody case involving a boy whose mother works as a snake-handler in a carnival. Her child has accused the carnival owner of abuse, and Fallin must resolve the situation.

It's the classic Guardian examination of outsiders and their difficulties in living in the real world. And, of course, in true dark-horse Guardian fashion, the issue doesn't get resolved.

“I thought I could walk a line with Nick, that I could make the character very internal, where he was not likeable but I could still make the audience root for him,” Baker says.

“There was this challenge: I thought I could play the sort of thing where you're hoping he makes the right choices and you feel for him when he makes the wrong choices.”

While some critics have attacked Baker's portrayal, he stands by his minimalist interpretation.

“I love the stoic nature. Growing up in Australia, I saw so many of those characters,” he says.

“You constantly reach down into your bag of tricks – and I don't mean that in a sense of cheap magic tricks. I mean you reach down into your bag of history and experience – and that can be cathartic.

“Not always, not every day and not every line, but when it is, it can also be difficult and painful.”

This decision to let Nick Fallin make the wrong choices, and the writer's refusal to provide upbeat endings, has left some long-term fans complaining that The Guardian is too relentlessly dark.

But that morally ambiguous approach is true to series creator David Hollander's vision – that of a film-noir-influenced study of human flaws and frailties.

Overtly, it's about the contrast between lawyers who work for the community and ones who go for the corporate dollar. Fallin works in both worlds (clocking up the requisite hours at his father's firm and for troubled children in court).

“I remember going to a halfway house with my brother in Denver a few years ago, and watching him talk to the kids there,” says Hollander.

“There was this one kid who was 16 years old and in and out of trouble. He'd had a brush with the law and was lying to my brother about what he'd done. It's one of those things where we feel badly for him, yet we fear him.

“He and others struck me as being such an interesting collection of victims and victimisers – and victims on their way to becoming victimisers. It was powerful. When I saw them, I thought, this is the kind of character I want to write about.”

It's also the kind of character that has seen the series become a stealthy kind of hit. It's the type of show that many people watch, but many don't talk about. It has a huge Internet fan base, and is a forum – or a kind of dramatic springboard – for discussing moral issues without clear-cut guidelines. These are the same kind of issues many of us face.

“The kinds of stories we're telling depict a certain kind of human helplessness,” Hollander says.

“It's about doing our best under difficult circumstances and not always prevailing.”

Which sounds like the best definition of heroism going, when you think about it.