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Doug Liman, whose eclectic filmography includes the shimmery, misogynistic Swingers, the illogically mesmorizing Go and the face-pounding electrically-charged The Bourne Identity, may very well be the closest thing modern filmmaking has to Howard Hawks. Hawks, who in a long long career, managed to make screwball comedies, film noirs, westerns, love stories, gangster films and war pictures, in such an Auteuristic style that he was never able to be way-laid into any semblence of a simplistic genre-heavy categorization, the way most filmmakers - even the greats - often are. Liman, in his as-of-now short, but still blossoming career, has the same flair for technique that Hawks had, as well as that same indiscernible touch for never getting pigeon-holed into one line of thinking. Never being one of the independents, Liman - like Hawks before him - is a studio director, but still manages to finagle his technical skills into reletively mainstream fare, without ever being able to become departmentalized into one certain set style or genre.
Mr. & Mrs. Smith, although easily the weakest link in Liman's oeuvre thus far, still accomplishes to help prove that Liman can touch base anywhere and still feel as if right at home - even in a film that had another director tied to it at one time. That other director was John Woo, and we may see touches of his influence in a lot of the slow-motion frenetic gunbattle scenes, although Liman, himself, is no stranger to those effects after Bourne. Watching this film we can imagine Hawks at the helm - albeit a Hawks with much more technical machinery and high tech gadgets to play with.
Unfortunately, for Liman, and for his audience, the film faulters at the level of screenplay. The story of two competing assassins/secret agents who just so happen to be married to one another, yet are somehow inexplicably oblivious to each others vocation. And yes, maybe we have to dig a bit deeper into that bag of suspension of belief to buy this story, but after all, it is a movie about improbable scenarios and impossible escapes, so what the hell. If one can enjoy the ludicrousness of the James Bond films, one can certainly take pleasure in this film, without having to fault its absurdity in judgement. These two spies-cum-unhappily married couple, who are in the throes of a five or six year itch phase of marriage, go about their daily lives, convincing the other that they are merely domesticated picket-fenced suburbanites, repleat with dour hum-drum conversations - one in particular, drolly discussing the addition of peas to the dinner-time routine - all the while playing at hired assassin during their days at the office.
Of course, unless you have been stuck in a cave-in somewhere for the past year, you know that this "perfect" couple is played by Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt - or as the paparazzi have dubbed them, in their yellowed attempts at journalism, Brangelina. And, of course, you know about the behind-the-scenes, tabloid goings-on that surround this production - even if just in passing. Oddly enough, consider the backstory, when Liman was making his directorial debut, he had wanted to cast a then-unknown Jennifer Aniston, but was deterred by the studio, who had wanted a bigger name.
Perhaps this is why Mr. & Mrs. Smith takes on such an air of needing to be something deeper than just an ultra-choreographed bullet-riddled jetstream of a movie. The very price of relationship is up for grabs here, but unfortunately, Liman never comes close to grasping onto that possible undercurrent of an antithesis - not that the studio would have ever allowed it anyway. Although they did allow for both Pitt and Jolie's characters to be pretty much amoral about their chosen profession - even commenting on how they sleep uninterrupted from any kind of moralizing nightmares or restlessness. But, all-in-all, with even the oddly erotic black & blue foreplay that leads to the inevitible make-up fuck being a let down in the end - opting instead for the easy way out - Liman has ultimately disappointed. So all we are left with, is a stagnant, happy, cutesy-pie bantering PG13 ending that tidies things up just about as inexplicably as they are first thrown together. But hey, Hawks didn't hit one out of the park every time either.
- June 10, 2005
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