Zero-Sum Game: "Mr. and Mrs. Smith"

Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2005, Dir. Doug Liman)

"I never said all actors are cattle ... what I said was all actors should be treated like cattle."

-- Alfred Hitchcock

How ironic, 25 years after his passing, and more than a half century since he directed an inconsequential little ditty called Mr. and Mrs. Smith, that the Master's pronouncement has been proven true by a Hollywood blockbuster action comedy titled Mr. and Mrs. Smith -- starring Brad and Angelina, no less.

The 2005 version of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, the critics are quick to tell us, has nothing to do with Hitch's 1941 screwball comedy with Carole Lombard and Robert Montgomery. As usual, the critics don't have it exactly right. One can read Doug Liman's film as the sunny-side down version of the earlier piece: where Lombard and Montgomery were two witty fools in love, their congenial marriage tested by manufactured, easily surmountable plot twists, Brad and Angelina's loveless union is given spice by the revelation of their secret agent identities and a host of familiar spy tropes, including the ultimate spook turn-on: erase him (or her) before she (or he) erases you.

Somewhere in Simon Kinberg's script lies a promising nugget -- how the antiseptic charms of the suburban life barely restrain the all-American preoccupations with danger, adventure, and bloody mayhem. It's a theme that Hitchcock flirted with many a time, punctuated with his bone-dry sense of humor. The difference is that Hitch never lost sight of the social niceties that gave satiric bite to his tales of counteragents and murder plots -- how many of his evildoers delighted in revealing themselves over a polite cup of tea? -- while the contemporary vision of this conundrum, as expressed in James Cameron's True Lies and 2005's Mr. and Mrs. Smith, is all about the collateral damage, as when our troubled lovers bash the bejeezus out of their tasteful designer curtains as well as each other. Sadly, that's about as close as this film gets to profundity or comedy, and that's particularly disappointing given that Liman has always paid attention to the quirks in his characters, even in big-budget thrillers like The Bourne Identity. Perhaps the combined star wattage of Brad and Angelina blinded the filmmakers to anything beyond placing them in Ken and Barbie poses (if you can imagine Ken and Barbie with automatic weaponry). The film is almost pornographic in its appreciation of our heroes, even as it skimps on anything that might define them as actual characters. Motivation and background are abstracted to the breaking point; hell, we never even learn if either of them work for the good guys. No, it's not the motion (or emotion) that matters here but the meat: how Angelina has the prettiest cut on her face from her bout of violence and lovemaking with Brad, or how Brad looks goofy but oh-so-sexy in his white shirt, bare legs, and ski boots. Cattle, indeed.

What to make of Angelina? I must admit, I've never quite understood her charms. Those bee-stung lips would certainly arrest anyone's attention, and her body -- voluptuous yet angular -- is its own special effect. However, for a superstar, there is something detached and incomplete about her performances. Usually she comes under fire for her vogue-like pouts -- nearly every shot of her in this movie seems like it was set up with an album cover in mind -- but I find those less troubling than her unconvincing stabs at method acting (at one point, I felt like chastising the makeup people for not importing enough fake tears). Brad just gives up entirely, underplaying his role to near invisibility, marble-mouthing his lines. He functions best when a film lays siege to his macho virility, as in David Fincher's Se7en and Fight Club, or he gets to go loopy, as the addled pothead in True Romance or the mental patient in 12 Monkeys. Here, he is too recessive a presence to register, and that proves deadly when it comes to striking any sparks with Angelina -- they certainly seem comfy together, but as an on-screen couple, they're too prickly and internalized to generate any real heat. The only character who escapes with his comic dignity intact is Vince Vaughn as Brad's agitated handler. Living with his mom and brandishing shotguns at the first sign of trouble, he seems to have sneaked in from a wilder, more interesting movie, and like a lonely signpost, he is the only remnant of the Liman style.

To compensate for the lack of plot and inspired comedy, Liman falls back on some half-hearted references from Prizzi's Honor and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and punches up the action quotient. So we get assaults on high-tech skyscrapers, another car chase down a wrong-way freeway, houses blasted to smithereens, kitchens scorched by gunfire. It's all well executed, and Liman has a thing for witty throwaway gags in the midst of the carnage -- one funny bit has Brad tsk-tsking to his wife, "We have to talk," from the back seat of a car, just as said car swan-dives into the river -- but in the end, Mr. and Mrs. Smith is really about marriage therapy, paid for with the corpses of hundreds of faceless agents. In short, Hollywood business as usual. I'll take murder with tea and crumpets, thank you very much.