Working Title Presents: Good, Actually: Mr. & Mrs. Smith
Let's talk about marital issues
I’m thinking of a movie. Tell me if it sounds familiar: There’s a married couple who exists in a world that’s a little off. Neither of them is who they claim to be. The film’s production is troubled and includes two stars from the movie coupling up, bringing their other relationships to rather public ends. The hype around this movie builds and builds and builds. While it does well financially and is fun to look at in places, it is generally panned, and in some cases, torched by critics. It seems like the discourse ABOUT the movie is bigger than the movie itself.
Are you thinking DON’T WORRY DARLING? I can certainly understand why, but check the title of this newsletter, dummy. It’s right there.
Welcome back to Working Title’s Good, Actually — the series where I go to the mat for movies that I think are (you guessed it) good, actually. Today, we’re re-evaluating the action-comedy MR. & MRS. SMITH. Light spoilers ahead, I guess but this movie is almost 20 years old so I don’t really know what to tell you.
Let’s take a trip back to 2005. Mariah Carey’s Emancipation of Mimi is everywhere. The Vans Warped Tour features The Academy Is…, My Chemical Romance, and mewithoutYou. The re-kindling of the Ryan and Marissa relationship has completely ruined the second season of The O.C. (they just wrote off my girl Alex) and the biggest story in movie news is less about a movie and more about the events surrounding a movie. Time is a flat circle.
If there’s one thing that people remember about MR. & MRS. SMITH, it is, for better and for worse, Brangelina. I was 14 years old and nowhere as near into movies (unless it was LORD OF THE RINGS or STAR WARS ) as I am now, but even I knew that Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston had split because of the (alleged) happenings on the set of this movie. I think, even now, if you asked someone on the street about MR. & MRS. SMITH, you’d most likely get a response along the lines of “oh yeah, isn’t that the movie where Brad and Angelina hooked up?”
And I think that’s pretty unfortunate because this is a movie that I quite enjoy and deserves more than its legacy of causing two celebrities to get a divorce.
I think it’s also important to remember the context of 2005 and that we used to have movie stars. Not just people who you recognize from being in a Marvel thing, but honest-to-God movie stars. We used to be a proper country, dammit. It is hard to imagine two more famous people at this time than Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. Maybe George Clooney and, ironically, Jennifer Aniston but the stars of this movie were in a different stratosphere than everyone else. Pitt was coming off FIGHT CLUB, OCEANS 11 and 12, and TROY. Jolie was coming off GIRL, INTERRUPTED, The TOMB RAIDER SERIES, ORIGINAL SIN, and, of course, SHARK TALE. By this time, they are both well-established sex symbols.
And therein lies one of the simple pleasures of watching a movie and one of the biggest strengths of MR. & MRS. SMITH: sometimes it’s just fun to watch hot people who have good chemistry together be hot and have good chemistry together on a big screen. I wish I had something more eloquent to say than that, but my caveman brain simply won’t allow it.
I think giving this movie some time and space to breathe from the whole Brangelina thing has really done it some favors. The setup of a married couple finding out they’re both assassins after having kept that secret from each other for years is a good one. There are several very exciting setpieces and Brad Pitt flashes the combination of charm and deadpan humor that he has long perfected. Upon rewatch this week, I was also struck by, and this is going to sound insane but stick with me, how evident of a star Angelina Jolie is. What I mean by that is this: Angelina Jolie used to be in movies ALL THE TIME and I feel like we took that for granted or, in my case, were too young to appreciate it. I don’t think all of her movies were good or anything and in fact, some of them are quite bad, but hot damn if she isn’t just a presence on screen at all times. She’s strikingly beautiful and cool as hell and I think while time has done this movie some favors, it also kind of relegated her stardom to the back of my mind and that was my mistake. She doesn’t really make as many movies as she used to, but she’s still got some juice when she decides she wants to get on screen (shoutout to THOSE WHO WISH ME DEAD).
Elsewhere in this movie are a bunch of cool people who are also at the peak of their powers. If 2005 Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are in a different stratosphere, then 2005 Vince Vaugh is nipping right at their heels. Let me list off a few movies Vaughn had done leading up to this one: ZOOLANDER, OLD SCHOOL, ANCHORMAN, STARSKY & HUTCH, motherfuckin’ DODGEBALL, and (right after) WEDDING CRASHERS. Ever heard of ‘em? He was also dating at the time, holy shit, JENNIFER ANNISTON, the ex-girlfriend of the two-time winner of PEOPLE Magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive and his co-star Brad Pitt. Vaughn is great in this movie as Pitt’s handler/buddy and the scenes in the apartment he shares with his mom are some of the funniest in the movie.
This brings me to another actor in this movie that I am in the bag for. My guy. My absolute boy. Seth Cohen himself. Mr. Adam Brody. If Adam Brody has 1 million fans, I am one of them. If Adam Brody has 100 fans, I am one of them. If Adam Brody has one fan, it’s me. Adam Brody walked so Timothée Chalmet could run. Timothée wants what Adam Brody has. Like Vaugh, this might be when Adam Brody was at his peak. The O.C was extremely popular and, amongst a certain subset of the teenage male population, GRIND was the best movie that had ever been made. Brody is great in his limited screen time, bringing his humor and nervous yet cool energy to his few scenes. I wanted even more of him both in 2005 and in my numerous rewatches since. I really do think he set the blueprint for a lot of popular actors today. This is not to say that Adam Brody hasn’t had a good career. He’s worked consistently, still gets roles, and has put out some of his best work ever recently (PLEASE seek out and watch THE KID DETECTIVE) but I still think he should have been one of the biggest stars in the world. I should just rename this newsletter to “What’s going on with Adam Brody?” honestly.
Elsewhere in this movie, we have a fun, early career appearance from Kerry Washington doing some good stuff as one of Jolie’s co-workers and we also get appearances from Keith David and Angela Bassett, respectively, as the head of MR. & MRS. SMITH’s dueling assassination syndicates. Very tight, IMO!
It’s worth mentioning, as I have in the previous installment of Good, Actually, that I think this movie is good, not perfect. Some of the dialogue is pretty weak (although the line “champagne’s for celebrating, I’ll have a martini” is a real banger), the 2005 technology is laughably dated, and there might be one or two too many explosions. That said, Pitt and Jolie’s chemistry more than makes up for those shortcomings and carries this movie for its 2-hour run time.
If this movie populates space in your brain strictly under the Brangelina of it all, I encourage you to revisit it now without that pretext surrounding it and enjoy it for what it is: a pretty fun movie about two hot people trying to murder each other. It was one of the main things on my mind as I watched DON’T WORRY DARLING and the surrounding circus of a press tour. Neither of these movies started the “discourse about the movie” trend and they certainly won’t be the last, but they do feel connected. Like spiritual successors, I wonder if in 15 years somebody will write about DWD like I’m writing about MR. & MRS. SMITH.
Oh, one more thing about this movie. It was directed by a guy named Doug Linman. Linman has directed a few movies I really enjoy including THE BOURNE IDENTITY and EDGE OF TOMORROW, but that’s not what’s important here. What is important is that when shooting MR. & MRS. SMITH, Linman went $26 million over budget. He was forced to use some of his own money to construct an important part of the set in his grandmother’s garage. When he was finished filming the movie, he blew up that set with a fucking hand grenade.
MR. & MRS. SMITH. It’s good, actually.
Thank you for reading Working Title and another volume of Good, Actually! If you enjoyed this edition or any other of my writing here, please consider subscribing and sharing on your socials. See you soon!