New Releases: Mr. and Mrs. Smith

Forty-something years ago, then-film-critic Manny Farber wrote an essay called ‘The Decline of the Actor”, in which he bemoaned the rise of a certain kind of screen star, one whose presence had been designed not to approximate that of an actual human, but instead something akin to ”a Macy’s Thanksgiving balloon, a gaudy exhibitionist fact.”

Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt belong to a very small pocket of contemporary stars who have turned such histrionics into an art form, and Mr. And Mrs. Smith both exploits and thrives on Pitt and Jolie’s larger-than-life dominance over the frame. As an exercise not only in style but in stylishness, it asks for very little from its stars, other than that they show up and be in every way spectacular; it asks for next to nothing from its audience, other than that they give in to that spectacle - and maybe even admit that, in the context of the summer blockbuster, sometimes a little gaudy exhibitionism is more than enough.

Director Doug Liman has spent the last three years executive producing The O.C., but Mr. And Mrs. Smith is not unlike what might have happened had he hopped on board Alias instead. It wouldn’t be untrue to say that the film doesn’t know whether its Die Hard or Trouble in Paradise, but it makes a pretty great case for not having to choose.  Regardless, it’s definitely a better remake of Charade than Jonathan Demme’s The Truth About Charlie, and I think that Stanley Donen film is maybe the best single frame of reference to place it in. Like Charade, Mr. And Mrs. Smith puts impossible characters in impossible situations which resolve themselves in impossibly illogical and only semi-satisfying ways, but both films blast off on star power and coast on chemistry.  Is the premise of Smith absolutely preposterous? Oh, totally. Did I care at all?

No, not a bit.

It’s an action comedy that opens like a Woody Allen movie, with our first glimpse of John and Jane Smith a straight-on two-shot, as they're caught rutting through marital complacence with the help of an off-screen therapist. So right from the start the genre-fucking has begun; as we travel back in time five (or is it six?) years to the couple’s meeting, it only continues, and continues to confuse.

Forced to feign a romance to save themselves from a tricky bit of business in Bogota, a night of sweaty drinking soon turns into marriage. John tells Jane he’s a “contractor”, Jane tells John she does something involving “systems support". Marriage seems the perfect cover, and John and Jane are each independently rather pleased with themselves for coming up with it - as if there was something revolutionarily clever to prentending to be boring. As we sweep in and out of their lives together and the secret worlds each keeps on the side, the whole contract-killer thing occasionally fuses with organically drawn relationship conflicts, and Liman's collusion of high-risk emotion with almost surrealistically over-the-top violence, as a structuring metapohor alone, actually works. And under that rubric, shoddy character development can be brushed away as part of the suspense of the thing - it’s not clear to John, to Jane or to the audience how much of their relationship is based on love and how much of it simply convenience, and the gaps that open up where the two fail to connect approach some kind of honesty about the impossibility of anyone really knowing the other. But at other times, the whole exercise feels you-must-be-kidding-me glib, something like You’ve Got Mail with a bad case of the La Femme Nikitas.

Vince Vaughn shows up here and there to drop more evidence that he might be the best comedic character actor of his generation, but really, this is a two-man show, and any and all faults of the film find their amelioration in the spectacle of two very enigmatic stars splooging charisma all over the screen.

Pitt has gracefully graduated from an almost anachronistically blonde pretty boy (for a second there in the early 90s, it looked like he was destined to become a better-built, less-articulate Troy Donohue) into a wise-cracking man’s man, most comfortable when slinging shots and dropping quips and throwing punches – preferably all at once.

Angelina Jolie could have been similarly trapped by her pin-up-ability - and it's true that several lad-mag Actress We’d Most Like to Smother in Molasses reader's poll titles threaten to crowd her Oscar right off the shelf - but even more so than Pitt, Angelina Jolie has grown into her stardom. More than just another movie star with blooming lips, Pilates-toned abs, and/or fantabulous knockers, Jolie has incorporated two elements into her star sign that are usually the province of male stars only: personal eccentricity, and danger. Angelina Jolie is the only actress alive that will never be able to play a straight girlfriend or wife - her watchability quotient is so powerful that she’s become virtually uncastable, even opposite a competing bold-faced name. Put it this way: if she was a Macy's Thanksgiving Day balloon, she'd kick any other female megastar’s Macy's Thanksgiving Day balloon's ass.

A lot of the pleasure that Mr. And Mrs. Smith stirs up comes from the lead up to, and fallout from, its centerpiece sex scene/deathmatch. To say that there’s any real suspense to the thing would sort of be besides the point: we’re watching two smirking 50-foot helium-fueled commodities crash rather clumsily into one another. I don’t think it’s a spoiler situation to say that this film’s ending is as much of a given as Revenge of the Sith’s, but its happy implausibility feels neither tacked-on nor condescending. Mr. And Mrs. Smith is, unquestionably, a film predicated on posture, devoid of any real relationship to the real – and yet at it’s core, it has no pretense towards being anything more than a really good time. It’s not a great film, but on that score, it’s at least a very honest film. And that in itself is a pretty cool cocktail in the current exhibition climate. It's clearly a film factory-built to appeal to as many different demographics as possible - but lucky for us, one of their target demographics is intelligent adults.

And this raises an aside that I think is worth mentioning: Mr. and Mrs. Smith could have been marketed in a million different ways, and someone at some point decided to push it as an action flick with a sexy sheen. The explosive elements are huge within the film, and hugely well done. But the film is also a fairly smart comedy of manners, and if you take the right kind of leap with it, it's almost Buneulian in its stylish absurdity. A trailer could have been cobbled together that would have highlighted these aspects of the film, and, put in rotation with other, thuddingly blockbustery pitches for the film. It could have attracted the one aspect of the audience that might not immediately jump down the current publicity slide: grown-ups.