Cokes And Swaggers
Mr. and Mrs. Smith
You don't have to be Osama bin Laden to think that only a horrible culture would produce an "entertainment" like Mr. and Mrs. Smith. But when a bootleg of this facetious comedy does get satellite-projected to that crazy hermit in a Middle Eastern cave, he'll probably break into an "I told you so" grin.
While director Doug Liman and stars Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie pretend to be making a new-era screwball comedy (adding guns, ninja blades, bazookas and hand grenades), they also have the temerity to comment on modern love relationships. Pitt and Jolie play John and Jane Smith, U.S. assassins who marry without revealing their deep-cover occupations until they become each other's target and their respective agencies then turn against them.
The nerviest thing about Mr. and Mrs. Smith is that it also seems designed to show off insouciant liberal disdain for the Bush administration. Screenwriter Simon Kinberg takes the calamitous gaffe of the FBI not corresponding with the CIA before 9/11 as the basis for his proposition that romantic-comedy mishaps can cleverly satirize inter-agency miscommunication. Mr. and Mrs. Smith opens with a fatuous marriage-counseling session where John and Jane lie to an unseen therapist (us) about their histories, their occupations and their sex lives. This glamorous duo has never smirked so much. More despicably than the James Cameron?Arnold Schwarzenegger True Lies (its marital confusion baldly imitated here), this movie proffers gleaming high-tech weaponry and high-fashion costuming to camouflage its unexamined ideology. (Jolie in diamond earrings and tinted sunglasses makes a very distracting killer.) John and Jane are not just pin-ups prettifying political nonsense; they're high fascist models selling a Western pop-cult jamboree of homeland cruelty and brutal espionage.
Is it too soon to call this violent trash the year's most repugnant film?
Mr. and Mrs. Smith's sex appeal is as misdirected as its politics. The battle-of-the-sexes jokes are fatuous. "There's this huge space between us filled with things we don't say to each other. What do you call that?" Jane asks her counselor. He responds: "Marriage." But Liman and Kinberg's satire has no credible concept of either marriage or love. John and Jane bed down without affect. This is yet another movie where sex means nothing, where intimacy makes no difference. As their marriage is set up (based on lies), Liman himself lies in the old Hollywood way: The Smiths fabricate their suburban domestic bliss with an amatory backyard barbecue. Rain on the pit makes "smoke," tossing a drink into the fire makes "flame." We're supposed to be enraptured by the kitschy romanticism. But what do we make of this modern marriage satire? The shrink accepts the couple's deception, never asking the right questions, just teasing. His casual approach to commitment misses the marital issues at question today. It's uselessly hetero-centric. Liman neither sanctifies marriage, nor does he prove that these characters love each other.
It's logical to assume that Liman doesn't believe in America, either. Just as the bickering innuendo "You wouldn't know how to find the button with two hands and a road map" seems to contradict Jane's sense of John's sexual aptitude, the film's controlling metaphor of the cute rivalry between American spooks contradicts the film's exhibition of ruthless government practices. "Same old, same old. People need killing," a federal wonk greets a coworker.
Liman attempts to expose this cold-blooded routine on one hand and then make it funny and thrilling. When John and Jane realize their professional enmity, they go at each other. First, it's a threat-laden dinner, then an all-out throw-down-mano y mano, male to female head-busting to a music track of "Express Yourself." (Okay, Tarantino?) This isn't multileveled social satire; it's cynicism. The Smiths' suburban home conceals American viciousness. Jane's kitchen hides a weapon depot. John's garage workshop hides an artillery bunker. These jolly, knife-in-the-back domestics are not to be trusted, but Liman glamorizes them for our envy. And that makes this film the most hideous corruption of the screwball comedy since the 1989 The War of the Roses.
John and Jane's domestic dispute is exaggerated to reflect the calamity of our government policies. After the household fracas-sheer overkill-Liman takes the fight outdoors onto the highway for the spectacle of public destruction. His point is obvious but his logic is faulty. John and Jane are not credible enough characters to justify the sadistic intensity of their social acts. The violence is out of scale. Liman sells out to Hollywood brutality (like his 2002 The Bourne Identity), yet Mr. and Mrs. Smith slickly condemns the Bush administration's 9/11 communications snafu. In that sense, the destruction in this movie is intended to normalize the traumatic public events of 9/11. Bombs and chaos make for decadent fun; John and Jane never suffer. But there are no bullet-proof vests for decadence; it comes from inside. Liman wants to have his Ground Zero and get off on it too.
It's easy to see that Mr. and Mrs. Smith plays with the identity of American assassins in order to critique the presumed inhumanity of U.S. policy. But Liman's sense of his heroes' psychology shows typical liberal shallowness. This comedy about the lives of political operatives never stops to consider how John and Jane manage an average day or a common night of intercourse. It's the same as Michael Moore's failure to imagine what really motivates politicians in Fahrenheit 911. Such facile political criticism gets us nowhere. Those who can't figure out Bush are asked to adore these stylish killers. Liman hasn't the guts or imagination to push John and Jane to the full extent of American might. They only kill other, faceless, Americans. Their taste for violence is crude (drinking orange juice out of jagged, broken tumblers) yet never touches their own lurid, surreal animal instincts-as would a true satirical wit like Marco Ferrari. Liman's most honest view of American idiocy comes when the Smiths hide out at a shopping mall and Pitt informs his non-domestic wife, "This is a good store." Commercial to the end, Liman cannot criticize American culture without simultaneously trying to sell it. That's why he uses celebrity icons as contradictory George Bush effigies. Liman can't help himself. Mr. and Mrs. Smith relishes the narcissism of The Great Satan.
Appreciation
Because Mr. and Mrs. Smith rocks the zeitgeist, I need to sneak a few words in about Apres Vous, a quiet film that settles for nourishing the soul. In this French boulevard comedy, Daniel Auteuil helps suicidal Jose Garcia find a job, a life, and win back his ex-fiancee (Sandrine Kilberlain). You know what happens next but director Pierre Salvadori focuses on the graceful, authentic interactions. Probing his polite title, he captures the heartbreaking depths of kindness and sacrifice-the perfect antidote to Liman, Pitt and Jolie's deceptive flashing of American self-hatred. -A.W.