"Mr. and Mrs. Smith"

Whether Angelina and Brad are really in a relationship or not, in their new film their union sure looks like a marriage -- when they're not trying to kill each other, they adore each other.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Jun 10, 2005 | "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" opens with a marriage-counseling scene in which the two principals -- Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, as Jane and John Smith -- face off against each other with us, and the camera, as their only witnesses. Their body language is stiff and reserved; their elbows and knees seem to be poised at combative angles. Each assumes an air of rational indifference, but surreptitiously, the two of them glare at each other like zoo cats with a beef. The marriage counselor pokes the usual questions through the bars of their cage -- How did they meet? What is their sex life like? -- but we can't see him; it's as if the poison fumes pouring off them have erased everything about him but his voice. Jane and John Smith have a problem: Each, unbeknownst to the other, is in the employ of an opposing organization.

In other words, they're two people attempting to be a couple.

There are relatively few romantic comedies about marriage or long-term couplehood (the most obvious examples are the Tracy-Hepburn collaborations like "Adam's Rib"), simply because the romantic-comedy formula is all about getting there (or returning there, as in "The Philadelphia Story"). After that, Mr. and Mrs. Lovenest are on their own, and good luck to them, but we really don't want to hear about it. One of my favorite movie endings is that of Preston Sturges' "The Palm Beach Story," in which three couples, including two pairs of identical twins, go to the altar together, and once the knot has been tied, the ominous legend "They lived happily ever after ... Or did they?" appears in flowing script on the screen. It's a bitter joke, but one that recognizes that so much of the work that goes into maintaining a partnership goes on after the lights come up.

"Mr. and Mrs. Smith" isn't a romantic comedy in the strict sense. Its writer, Simon Kinberg, modeled the movie on Hong Kong action pictures, and while that angle gives it a certain bloodthirsty zest, it also creates a few problems, most notably a noisy, cluttered, protracted climax in which the gunfire is just a distraction from the far more interesting romantic banter. (Regardless, it's important to note that "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" is one of an increasingly small number of big mainstream pictures made from an original script, as opposed to being a reworking of an old movie or TV show.) But "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" understands the nuts and bolts of marriage (and I use the term to include all types of long-term relationships), and recognizes that while we all like to believe that good unions float comfortably on a featherbed of mutual respect and kind words, the reality is that as much as you may love your spouse, sometimes you just want to throttle him. But let an outsider try to drive the two of you apart, and you merge into a united front: It's probably better if you don't have to use automatic weapons, but in "Mr. and Mrs. Smith," those are just a very loud metaphor for loyalty.

John and Jane Smith are both paid assassins, although it takes almost half the movie -- and several years of marriage -- for each to figure out the other's secret. We see each of them leaving their glamorous suburban home on assignment: She, in a Kim Novak updo and black trench coat, heads out to first seduce and then snap the neck of a very naughty weapons dealer; he, in scruffy duds, with artfully arranged rooster-feather hair, is off to a seamy bar where he'll put bullets through a bunch of bad'uns in a dark, dirty backroom. John and Jane have already begun to realize that they lead separate lives, but they don't yet know how similar those separate lives are: They have more in common than they even know.

Next Page: How can you look at Pitt when she's anywhere on the screen?

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