| Bilgi :First, for the handful of obsessive film
buffs out there who never read the tabloids, Mr. and Mrs. Smith has nothing to do with
the 1940s screwball comedy of that name directed by
Alfred Hitchcock. Instead, it is a curious hybrid of action
movie and domestic comedy that stars Brad Pitt and Angelina
Jolie as professional assassins who are married but have kept
their jobs secret from each other. Each spouse has all sorts
of gadgets and weapons hidden around the house, and each
assumes the other has a regular, boring job. And perhaps, in
trying to live up to their suburban disguise, they have let
things become too boring.
The film begins with a nicely understated
sequence in which the Smiths attend a counseling session with
an offscreen marriage therapist, who asks how long they have
been together. "Five years," says John (Pitt). "Six," says
Jane (Jolie), with the sort of barely suppressed irritation
that comes from bottling things up for too long. "Five or
six," says John, in a way that indicates he knows his wife
won't accept such a noncommittal compromise.
 Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie play
husband-wife assassins
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At this point, moviegoers may recall that
Pitt himself saw his marriage (to Jennifer Aniston) come to an
end after five or six years together while he was making this
movie, and that there has been much media speculation about
the reasons for this. Suffice to say that such gossip has no
place here; for me, at least, it was quite easy to forget
about all that, once the story gets going. Indeed, the only
other time I found myself thinking about the movie stars'
real-life personae, it was during a scene in which the Smiths
attend a neighbor's party, and one of the women hands a baby
over to Jane, leaving her to look rather uncomfortable as she
holds the child at an awkward arm's length. The ironic humor
here, of course, comes from the fact that Jolie's fondness for
children is a huge part of her offscreen image.
But eventually the spy stuff must take over.
John and Jane are each given assignments to take out a certain
individual, and they unwittingly sabotage each other's plans,
but without immediately revealing their identities. When they
report their failures to their bosses, each of them is given
48 hours to figure out who got in the way, and to get rid of
that person. And it isn't long before they discover that
they've both been sleeping with the enemy.
 John (Pitt) reflects on the
notion of killing his wife
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And then the fireworks really begin. Mr. and Mrs. Smith is a little like a
cross between True
Lies, but without the misogyny (this time, husband and
wife are equally smart, equally strong, equally violent), and
The War of the Roses. But only a little. You
could also say the film represents an effort by director Doug
Liman to pair the cozy relationship humor of his earlier,
smaller hit Swingers (he even brings back Vince Vaughn
as a sexist bachelor) with the action-packed thrills of his
later, bigger hit The
Bourne Identity. And like a lot of marriages, this
combination hits a few rough patches, but it hangs together in
the end.
Much of the credit goes to Pitt and Jolie,
who are both quite charismatic and have proved their talents
in a range of genres, which makes them perfect for a
genre-blending film such as this one. The flashback showing
how the Smiths first meet is particularly charming; they are
both in Bogota, Colombia when the local militia starts
rounding up tourists who are traveling by themselves, so they
use each other as cover, and once they are alone together,
they find they have a special chemistry. The next morning,
Jane wakes up to find that John is gone, but before she can
mourn his absence, he shows up with her breakfast—and he says
he had to prepare it himself because the hotel staff have all
"fled."
 Giving new meaning to the idea
of 'cleaving' to one's spouse
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But then we come back to the present, in
which the Smiths confirm their suspicions about each other
over an amusingly suspenseful dinner, and then—over the course
of several confrontations, some public, some private—get down
to the business of shooting, punching, and kicking each other,
while rigging the odd room or two to explode. But Liman never
takes the violence so seriously that it gets in the way of the
humor; he is pretty obviously just using an exaggerated form
of an already exaggerated genre to make light of humdrum
marital difficulties, and seen in that light, it's not that
bad. A lot of humor is rooted in the ability to give us a
sense of proportion about our lives; in real life, some people
throw dishes at their spouses, but in this movie, people blow
things up, and it's all so over-the-top that you can't really
take it any more seriously than, say, The
Incredibles, which also mocked suburban life through
the use of explosive spy-movie clichés.
One problematic issue that the film never
properly addresses is who, exactly, the Smiths work for, or
who, exactly, the Smiths are fighting when they discover they
have a common enemy. With, say, a James Bond film, it isn't
too hard to suspend our moral qualms and accept that
governments give certain agents the permission—even the
duty—to kill people who work for other governments; that sort
of thing is just set dressing for a traditional battle between
good guys and bad guys. But Mr. and Mrs.
Smith enters into morally murkier territory, especially
in its third act when the Smiths must team up against their
mutual foe, and it doesn't allow us to bracket things off so
easily. It also leaves some key plot threads unresolved, even
as it tries to give us some sort of happy ending.
 Vince Vaughn (right) is cast as
humorous bachelor
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It is also not clear what some of the film's
suburban symbolism is intended to convey. A chase scene
involving a mini-van and some sleek cars driven by the enemy
agents could be a celebration of suburban spirit, but a
climactic shoot-out inside a discount department store is open
to more ambivalent readings; are the enemies invading a
suburban paradise, which the Smiths heroically defend, or is
the destruction of that store intended as some sort of
critique of middle-class consumerism, with its ideas about
what makes the "perfect" home?
Things like these keep Mr. and Mrs. Smith from being the very
good film it could have been. Still, Pitt and Jolie have
chemistry to burn, and the film hits more often than it
misses. Christian moviegoers might also get a kick out of the
way Christian pop culture is used to signify the dull,
middle-class life. A cover of Amy Grant's "Baby Baby" can be
heard on the soundtrack when the Smiths attend their
neighbors' party, and Chris Weitz (who, together with his
brother Paul, co-directed About a
Boy, co-wrote Antz, and
co-starred in Chuck & Buck)
plays a neighbor from whom the Smiths steal a couple of "Jesus
Rocks!" jackets. Because, of course, every suburban paradise
must have its Ned Flanders. |