June 9-15, 2005

movies

Domestic Espionage

The couple that slays together: Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie draw down.

Brad Pitt dances through Mr. & Mrs. Smith's generic he-spies, she-spies stuff.

by Cindy Fuchs

Brad Pitt can dance — quelle surprise. Though this isn't his primary purpose in Mr. & Mrs. Smith — his John Smith is a superstar spy and international assassin — Pitt engages in some frankly enchanting physical activity, more evocative of Fred Astaire than James Bond. The fancy steps are of a piece with John's general quickness of mind and athletic body, but more interestingly, they remove him from his rather prosaic professional-killer status. John's occasional lapse into scampering, complaining, stuttering boy makes him just about as charming as can be.

That's not to say that the rest of his movie is entirely triumphant. The sparring husband-wife business indicated by the title is certainly familiar, and given that Mrs. is played by Angelina Jolie, well … let's just say that she does what she does: stretches out her fabulous legs, narrows her bedroom eyes, purses her notorious lips. Slightly more complicatedly, Jane and John are living out a doubled version of The Bourne Identity, Doug Liman's previous brush with action flick-iness. Where Jason Bourne was piecing together a past lost through government-agency mind-messing, the couple acts out a more mundane but potentially resonant fantasy of fractured selves. As flashbacks show, they meet in a tropical hotel as covert killers, they dance some tango and never tell one another who they are, and over five or six years of marriage, they become such workaholics that they grow estranged.

This premise — that they share a lost past — makes them fodder for multigeneric conventions. The movie opens on their visit with a counselor (the offscreen voice of William Fichtner), a device less cute than it thinks it is (watch them lean away from one another and fidget, as if answering to Bob Eubanks by way of Dr. Phil). They're each assigned the same job (to assassinate nebbishy Adam Brody) and essentially live parallel lives: She works with Angela Bassett, he with Keith David; her best friend is Kerry Washington, his is Vince Vaughn (who offers his usual mush-mouthed pithiness, as in, "You're Macy's and Gimbel's; you would be whatever channel against the We Channel").

Equally damaged and anxious, they pretend to be happily married (she buys dreadful draperies, he doesn't notice she's added peas to the dinner menu) even as they live separate lives (they leave for work in separate vehicles, they keep secret arsenals). They spend romantic-comedy time complaining to their friends, they spend action-movie time immersing themselves in their work. And in this alternate universe, both are sensational — she dons a dominatrix disguise to take out her target up close; he goes the scruffier route, posing as a rowdy drunk of a cardplayer to get similarly close enough to complete his job efficiently and spectacularly, though with louder guns.

Their different approaches are superficial. Their high-tech, low-affect likeness is what makes them distrust one another, even though, according to the familiar conceit, they really do love one another. In other words, the couple's problem is not in itself compelling: As the trailers reveal, they learn of their mutual deceit and begin a little war against one another (and yes, the film owes more than basic plot outline to The War of the Roses), outfitted with bombs and automatic weapons, augmented by simultaneous contracts to hit the other. They're just as glad to do it too, feeling righteous and not a little duped that they've been so duped. Their less-than-earnest scheming to get even leads to one nice and rather lengthy bit in the house, where each has access to all manner of hidden artillery and they trade married-couple japes ("Are you still alive, honey?") while checking around corners with mirrors and aiming shoulder-mounted grenade launchers.

The situation is certainly thin, which means Mr. & Mrs. Smith floats along on the gossamer appeals of its stars (and yes, all that business about Brad and Jennifer splitting and Brad and Maddox on the beach). In this context, John's sweetly timed teacup-juggling (so it doesn't smash and give away his position), or better, his dance with an imminently clattering machine in a department store (to avoid similar revelation) are unexpected highlights. Deft and Buster Keatonish, these bits of comedy suggest another movie, one with a peculiarly buoyant sense of art-making along with all the convention-cracking.

This other movie lies beneath the movie that's being marketed, a deconstructive project of a piece with Bourne stylistically (crisp editing and antic stunts) but also thematically. The fun of it lies not in the rediscovery of identity and purpose, for any movie does that. The fun of it lies in (brief) resistances and bits of irony. All of these parts move quickly, some more awkwardly than others. In this mechanical context, Pitt's light-touch moments are transporting.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith Directed by Doug Liman A Fox release Opens Friday at area theaters