After John and Jane discover that they are both secretly assassins in Mr & Mrs Smith, they have to methodically go through and debunk all the lies they’ve told each other. John reveals that he had a brief previous marriage, (“No, you’re not going to kill her,” he says exasperatedly when Jane demands the woman’s name and social security number). For her part, Jane reveals that her parents died when she was five.
“Then who gave you away at our wedding?” John demands.
“Paid actor,” Jane admits.
The joke is, more or less intentionally, meta. Jane and John have both set up complete alternative identities as cover stories; they’re acting out their lives. And that is precisely what they’re doing in real life as well, where Brad Pitt is pretending to be John Smith pretending to be John Smith, and Angelina Jolie is Jane Smith pretending to be Jane Smith. The conceit of the film is the same as the marketing of the film. What if two extraordinary people pretended to be normal, boring, suburbanites, who marinate in quiet desperation and bitter lack of fulfillment?
Mr & Mrs Smith was also the set on which Pitt and Jolie met; they became the most famous celebrity couple in the world following Pitt’s separation from Jennifer Aniston in 2005. Now that Pitt and Jolie are separating in turn, Mr & Mrs Smith seems prescient in various ways (though not in its portrayal of Jolie as a woman who hates children, obviously). A couple whose perfect life turns out to be a complete fiction; that resonates, right?
Well, maybe. What with the klieg-light media obsession, it’s easy to forget that we don’t really know that much about the inner workings of Jolie and Pitt’s relationship. We – “we” here meaning everyone on the planet, just about – want to know the intimate secrets of these exciting, sexy, unusual people. We want to know them even if, or perhaps especially if, those secrets are banal and tedious and boil down to something like, “They stopped getting along.”
And this is where, in hindsight, the frothy by-the-numbers Mr & Mrs Smith approaches a kind of genius. The film is a multi-layered, interlocking celebrity fantasy, which caters to both the desire to be the wonderful, exciting Pitt and Jolie, and the voyeuristic desire to experience schadenfreude at their manifest failure to be wonderful and exciting.
“It probably feels like you’re the only ones going through this,” the offscreen marriage therapist tells the couple earnestly at the beginning of the film, “but I’ll tell you something: there are millions of couples that are experiencing the same problems.” The joke is that this is false – most couples aren’t concealing careers as assassins, to say nothing of the fact that most people aren’t married to universally idolized male or female sex symbols. But the fun of the film is that it’s also, maybe, true; stars have marital troubles just like Us. There’s a kinky, if overdetermined, charge that comes from watching Angelina Jolie dress in a hot leather dominatrix outfit to get close to and kill one of her targets, or from watching Pitt virilely strip off his shirt (again). But there’s also a fetishistic edge to watching Jolie glowering past those perfect cheekbones at her husband because he doesn’t sufficiently appreciate the drapes, or watching Pitt, the movie star who serially dated the most celebrated women in Hollywood, stutter and stammer and try to avoid confessing his sex life isn’t so great.
Jolie’s dominatrix getup is given extra va-voom because she hides it under a demure coat in preparation for a great reveal – and because the boots accidentally peek out when she’s at a neighbor’s suburban party. Similarly, Pitt’s caddish dudebro bumbling is funny and engaging because it’s secretly a front; in the film he repeatedly adopts the persona of a clueless civilian schmo in order to conceal his suave uber-competent spy deadliness. The real source of stimulation isn’t sexy excitement or boring mundanity. It’s the closeted concealment itself, and the way the viewer gets to know more about the characters than the characters do about themselves.
When they first meet, John and Jane go to a carnival where they line up for a shooting game; John thinks he’s putting one over on Jane by pretending not to know how to shoot, and Jane thinks she’s putting one over on John by pretending not to know how to shoot. But really it’s the viewer who is in on the truth, which is that they both know how to shoot – and, inevitably, in on the even realer truth that they don’t know how to shoot, but are pretending to be run-of-the-mill assassins when they are, in fact, those rarefied movie stars Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt.
Just as the energy in Mr & Mrs Smith comes from the overlapping layers of lies and revelations, so too does celebrity culture run on the titillating thrill of intimacies concealed and then revealed. The news of Jolie and Pitt’s separation will be mined for details and secrets. The film foreshadows the breakup not because it suggests that the stars were never compatible, but because it anticipates the fascination of every stimulating hint that Mr & Mrs Smith are more exciting than they appear, and every equally stimulating hint that they are not.
