Better Late Than Never: Mr. & Mrs. Smith

 

 

Were it not for the fact that the casting of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie in the title roles led to the whirlwind romance and marriage of one of this century’s most famous power couples in Hollywood the 2005 action comedy Mr. & Mrs. Smith would have completely been forgotten by history.

There’s honestly nothing to recommend it other than as a Hollywood footnote. Even by the standards of 2000s action comedies the movie is utterly flat and devoid of inspiration. The idea of the film – a married couple who doesn’t know that their spouses are members of a rival agency of assassins – is barely imaginative by the scope of comedies of that era. (I can’t say with certainty but I think the exact plot was tried out on a soft-core porn film five years earlier, which isn’t how these things usually work.) The action scenes lack the flair of the best films in the genre, the dialogue is not that interesting and even the chemistry between Pitt and Jolie is hampered by the necessity of the PG-13 rating. This film has nothing to recommend it, much less deserve to be remade into a TV show.

Which is why I give credit to Donald Glover, who co-wrote the Amazon series with Francesca Sloane, for deciding to basically junk everything about the film and essentially completely reimagine a different story. The only common link between the movie and the Amazon series is that the title characters are named John and Jane Smith. But even that’s not the same context; in his version John and Jane are working for an agency together to do secret missions and the marriage itself is just a cover for it. You almost think Glover chose to get the rights for the series for the sole purpose to get it greenlit and he knows all too well there isn’t a Brangelina fanbase devoted enough to say that its Mr. & Mr. Smith ‘in name only’ and review bomb it the way every other precious franchise seems to be these days.

In this series the title roles are played by Glover and Maya Erskine. In the opening episode ‘First Date’ we see the two of them, who will be known as John and Jane Smith, go through a mysterious recruitment process via computer that they only know as ‘Hihi’ because of how every briefing starts. Both Glover and Erskine’s characters have been part of the intelligence and army before so espionage in familiar to them and there are differences – Glover has killed people before the series begins, Erskine hasn’t. They are told that they will be working for a certain amount of time but they must cut off all ties with the outside world. Glover has more problems with this than Erskine; he has a mother who he is still in contact with. (My review is based on the first three episodes of the series.) The marriage is supposed to cover for their work, and its clear the pairing is done a certain way, though we have no idea what the context is.

Taking on the identities of John and Jane Smith, the two of them are set up in a New York loft apartment that is luxurious by the standards of spy films and almost by the standard of those who live on the Upper East Side. The pilot  called First Date shows the two of them getting to know each other but not comfortable with each other. Neither Glover nor Erskine wants to get attached during this period. Their first mission by Hihi is to track down someone at a New York restaurant, follow this individual until they get a package, intercept and replace it and then deliver it to a specific address. Much of Mr. and Mrs. Smith is more successful as a comedy than a drama because it plays into the idea that no matter what mission agents are sent on, it will invariably go wrong at some point due to human error. Following a target when you’re Ethan Hunt is difficult enough; to do so using the MTA as your mode of transportation is practically a guarantee for failure.

Watching the first three episodes of Mr. & Mrs. Smith I couldn’t help but be reminded of the set up and much of the execution of the first season of Severance. We don’t know the real identities of the protagonists nor how they were found by Hihi in the first place. They don’t know what agency their working for or what the purpose of the mission is only that they are ‘mysterious and important’.  The title characters don’t have the benefit of being able to separate work life and home life in the way the people at that company do and we can’t discount the possibility that they’re being observed beyond the technology. I’m beginning to suspect that a character only identified in the credits as Hunky Neighbor might be part of the group, simply because he’s played by Paul Dano and we know by now we can’t trust Paul Dano’s intentions for anything.

There’s also the fact that everyone who works for the agency is also called John and Jane Smith. We actually meet a couple using those names in the first minutes of the series. They’ve been hiding for awhile and they’ve clearly been on the run for just as long. We don’t know why or what happened but we know very quickly that leaving isn’t something that go very well. Later in this series we meet another couple also called John and Jane Smith who are if anything more reckless and high-living then Glover and Erskine.

And it’s not clear, three episodes in, what kind of work Hihi wants them to do or even whether its for a good purpose or a malevolent one. The ‘First Date’ ends with the two of them managing to intercept their package, manage to deliver – only to find out it’s a cake for a birthday party. Glover and Erskine leave baffled – and moments later the house blows up. The two have no time to ask questions: they just run for their lives. Their second mission is to track down the buyer at a silent auction, who turns out to be a major real estate tycoon. (In a callback to my perceptions of Severance, he’s played by John Turturro.) They track him down; he asks them to engage in a very bizarre act and then they both inject him with truth serum. He gets out of their sight, begins to reveal the truth to all of the people at the auction and then has a bad reaction to it, and ends up dying. They have to dispose of his body and when Glover reports the results ‘Hihi’ tells them that they have failed and that ‘only two remain’. The third episode (called First Vacation) tells them to go to a ski resort in the Alps, bug the room of an Australian billionaire (played by Sharon Horgan) bug both her and her husband’s phones and record a conversation that will happen at 5 pm. Both Erskine and Glover think they are being asked to serve as marriage counselors and while it turns out what’s going is a radical kind of counseling, it’s not clear why their mission was just to record the conversation.

Mr. & Mrs. Smith is Glover’s first series as showrunner since the incredible Atlanta came to end in the fall of 2022. Teamed with some of the creative forces behind the masterpiece, including Hiro Murai, you can sense the tonal similarities in both series. We are in a familiar setting but there is an illogic to almost all the action the major characters are going through, yet Glover and Erskine react to with the same straight faced nature to it we saw Earn Marks and Paperboi going through no matter how many weird things happened to them in Atlanta. The series doesn’t have the same surreal nature to it but everyone still reacts as if the weird events around them were completely normal.

In that sense Glover is just as perfectly cast as John Smith as he was as Earn Marks. He’s clearly more capable of adapting and surviving than Earn was and in this case he does so with a cynical world-weariness that we expect from someone who’s survived combat. We also see in a critical moment in the third episode that Glover’s character is capable not just of being an action hero but of having a moral compass – and even when it gets him into trouble, he can be just as funny.

Maya Erskine has been one of the great undervalued performers of television for a while, working in such under-watched comedies as Man Seeking Woman, Insecure and Casual. She first registered on my radar in the Emmy nominated gem Pen15 where she and her longtime friend Anna Konkle played themselves as eighth graders. It’s a credit to Erskine as a performer that I had no problem believing either her or Konkle as eighth-graders: Erskine personally committed to every awkward gesture that made me remember being that old. It says something about her ability as a performer that I don’t recognize her as this Mrs. Smith. She’s very attractive but she seems to go out of her way to not play into it; she’s also the more cynical and less empathetic of the two (we still don’t know anything about her family life). I was grateful that Erskine received her first Emmy nomination for acting in this role; it’s at the same level of some of the other dramatic powerhouses in this category.

The series also boasts one of the most astounding guest casts since Poker Face, most of them targets of the missions or characters in John and Jane’s orbit. Dano and Turturro, who I mentioned before, were nominated for Best Guest Actor in a Drama. I have yet to see any of the nominees for Best Guest Actress but I look forward to seeing such talents as Parker Posey, Michaela Coel and Sarah Paulson in their roles. Considering such talents as Wagner Noura and Ron Perlman also have high-level performances, it’s clear that Glover can just as easily bring in talent as he was with Atlanta.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith was one of the most nominated series for the 2024 Emmys: it was nominated for sixteen, including Best Drama. The TCA has nominated it for Outstanding New Program, it won Breakthrough Drama at the Gotham TV Awards. The series received eleven nominations from the Astras and I have little doubt it will do well at the Golden Globes and Critics Choice Awards at the end of the year.

And after three episodes I’m inclined to think that the Emmys and all the other groups  did get it right. To call Mr. & Mrs. Smith a reboot is completely inaccurate: the movie and the show have nothing in common. Glover essentially did what we rarely see in TV adaptations of intellectual properties and followed in the steps of Battlestar Galactica and Friday Nights Lights. He used the bare framework of the source material to tell a completely new and far superior story. And on every level this show works better than many other series: it has great writing, directing and acting, from the leads and guest stars; melds genres in a way so many of the best shows do (drama, action, thriller, rom-com and slapstick can call be found in the same five minute period) and hangs it on something we rarely see done well in any Peak TV: a love story. We know from the start it could very well end disastrously but there’s something heartwarming in an age of so much bleakness on television to see the concept at least visited. Like with Atlanta Glover is trying to meld many genres at once and while he isn’t always flawless, it still works very well most of the time.

The show has already been renewed for a second season but while Glover says he will continue to write for it both he and Erskine have been mum about whether they will appear in the next season. That’s actually not a deal breaker with me. Mr. & Mrs. Smith shows that it could be the kind of series that could survive any kind of revolutionary change, and we all watched enough Atlanta to know Glover spent much of the final two seasons off-screen then he was on it. This show may not be as original a concept as Atlanta was but Glover has found a way to put a mark on it that truly make it his own.

My score: 4.5 stars.