Mr and Mrs Smith: “Oh What a Tangled Web We Weave”

Two thoughts reigned supreme as I watched Donald Glover's reimagining of the 2005 Pitt/ Jolie vehicle “Mr. and Mrs Smith.”; “Spy movies are very cool and Donald Glover is not’, and ‘there is a underlying contempt here for the things he's mimicking”. Ultimately I could end this entire thing with just that sentence. There are a lot of reasons why I didn't fall for this show, and why at a certain point it started to become a chore to watch it, but most of them could be housed under the statements above. What I found fascinating about the show was the contrast of what the interviews leading up to the launch wanted us to believe the show was going to do, and what the show actually did. The mission (at least by what has been said in interviews seemed to be to subvert the genre, push something deeper out of the marriage angle, and embrace something opposite of what the film possessed. But for all the conversation about how different this was going to be from the film, this was pretty much the same, just with people, places, tech, lighting, cinematography, vehicles, fashion etc that were less cool or interesting than both the original film and most of the movies/TV shows in the spy genre.

There had been a couple of quotes from Donald Glover that had made their way around Twitter prior to the show's debut. I found them somewhat annoying and misguided, but once I started watching I thought initially Mr. and Mrs. Smith had done a great job building a relationship between two people, with two people who had such glaringly astonishing chemistry. Erskine and Glover really do bounce off of each other magnificently. They have similar timing, similar forms of self-depreciation, and are a match aesthetically and spiritually, but they were right when they said in interviews that they are not Brad and Angelina and they “can't replicate that”. Episode five was the beginning of the scratch to an itch I had even while mostly enjoying the show up to that point. “Do You Want Kids” had all the ingredients for an unforgettable banger; Ron Perlman, a subject that is very much so worth deep conversation and commentary, a car and foot chase with hand to hand combat, expensive homes, and Lake Como, Italy. What came out was completely forgettable unless you count how forgettable it is as memorable. Perlman is a stand in for a “trial baby” in an episode about the couples different views on having kids. Unfortunately it's handled with all the subtlety of a mack truck in space, from the title to Perlman’s performance (which is very good, but also very obnoxiously on-the-nose ). It has nothing interesting to say about parenting or about the two potential parents, (outside of their differences of opinions on children) and nothing very interesting or memorable besides Perlman. Leaving the episode I thought “You had far more time to explore the issue of rearing children in this career field and you've come away with something not much deeper than what the original film had to say about it.” Worse still, the film made very clear that child rearing was something that they didn't necessarily need in their lives. In a country that has pushed child rearing on woman's bodies like crack cocaine, and is currently doing everything it can to force them into it as an inherent duty, which is more refreshing?

“I watched it and honestly, I was like, ‘I don’t understand it’ . I mean, I get why it’s iconic because of the people starring in it - it’s just two gorgeous people in this situation. But the story I didn’t quite understand. I called my brother and he was like, ‘This is just a great date movie. It’s boys vs. girls. What else do you want?”

— Donald Glover, Entertainment Weekly

“There's this huge space between us and it just keeps filling up with everything that we don't say to each other what is that called?” This is something Jolie's “Jane” says to their therapist less than a quarter of a way through the movie and it is reinforced by the imagery and conversations we see both before and after she says it. Near the end of the film that same therapist tells them that marriage is about battling through obstacles by battling together. Why reduce all of this to “two gorgeous people in this situation” and “boys vs girls”? In an interview with Entertainment Weekly Maya Erskine said “Angelina and Brad are untouchable in that you can't recreate that and Donald and I are just so different it felt exciting to play a couple that you might recognize as your friends or yourselves”. Tabling the fact that I don't agree with the idea that you can't recognize your friends or your selves in Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie simply because they look good or are incredibly cool people - underneath these words is that ever present suggestion that by the mere fact of being beautiful, you lack profundity. That particular idea comes out clearly in the wash of this show. Later Erskine says; “No, I'm kidding I obviously couldn't be further from her. I tend to play characters that feel like the rejects of society, and my Jane felt like it was a reject version of Angelina, it wouldn't ever be her it couldn't be”. That sentence is representative, of a repeated theme in these interviews and by consequence the show that suggests that they are doing something that is not present in the previous adaptation or the actors in it, when in actuality it is very present in both. It makes a lot of what's said feel pretentious and guarded, which at times is what the show felt like too. The “I tend to play characters that feel like the rejects of society” implies a difference that doesn't exist. In actual fact that defines Jolie's career as well, in “Gia”, in “Hackers”, in “Girl Interrupted”, in “Gone in 60 seconds” and more. When you get wrong what it is that may need correcting, adding, or improvement in a project, then usually, you end up with something worse than.

If the goal was to dress this thing down, to make it something more akin to reality, (nothing in movies is ever a true reality) the pathway to that was made very clear in something like 2011’s “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy”. In Tomas Alfredson’s hazy adaptation of Le Carré’s story every single aspect feels like a repudiation of everything cool about spy movies. The clothes are lovingly austere, the locales poetically mundane, the photography is strikingly drab, each item so uncool that they reach out, wrap around and somehow end up right back at being cool. Mr. and Mrs. Smith would have been far more interesting if Glover would have accepted that and joined in with Sloane and the rest of the co-creators to try to create something that truly acknowledges and embraced that un-cool or embraced that he wants to be “it” and maybe more importantly why he wants be “it”. It's an inferiority complex that as a consequence creates a superiority complex. This finds its way into Mr. and Mrs. Smith by way of it's acceptance of the most banal ideas of beauty represented in its vehicles, in the clothing, and represented in the inflated sense of depth as it pertains to the shows discussions of relationship dynamics. Most of what this show aims to do relationship-wise as stated was already accomplished by FX’s brilliant “The Americans”, and done a thousand times better. John's insecurities around manhood and masculinity are interesting bullet points in the show, but never become a full treatise. The hunting, the therapy, the asthma. It shows them, it brings them up, it jots a note down, but it doesn't have anywhere near the kind of depth or complexity displayed in how The Americans drew and handled some of the very same issues around masculinity and having your better be your female partner in Matthew Rhys’s “Phil Jennings”. Its only slightly more complex than the original. Most of what Mr. and Mrs. Smith seeks to subvert as a show about spies, or as a show about relationships is either common, superficial, boring, or try hard, especially the action. What is left after both the cool and the un-cool fail is a show that wasted alot of its talent, it's locales, it's subjects, and is neither as deep as it thinks it is, or as cool as it thinks it is. Bland and tasteless, a box of grape nuts.

Mimicry is a superficial recreation of the most commonly recognized (and many times stereotypical) aspects of a person(s) or thing. It is an impoverished version of imitation mostly due to the fact that it is not knowledgeable of the subject and is sometimes willfully ignorant about it, because underneath it is a conflict between disdain and admiration for person (s) or a thing. Charlie Sheen's diatribe to Chris Tucker in “Money Talks” which includes the words “G posse on a fly tip” is a great example. It is impoverished because you can tell hes never been around black folk and even while admiring them on some level doesn't like them either. Donald Glover, Francesca Sloane, and the shows other authors suffer from a lack of reckoning with their conflicted feelings about cool and about beauty. Consequently that lack of a reckoning is what pulls the rug out from under their attempt for this deeper show they were clearly so intent on creating. You can't claim to distance yourself from something you're so obviously trying to recreate. If you're trying so hard to distance yourself from what they created, why are you dressing like them? Why are you so manicured? Why is everything around you so adherent to the most normalized ideas of beauty from cars to clothes to homes? Why not admit that you thought Brad Pitt looked awfully good in those form-fitted sweaters and shirts and that you tried to recreate that? Why not lend something to what you clearly liked other than backhanded compliments about their movie stardom? Why not go for the aesthetics and values in Apple TV’s Gary Oldman starrer “Slow Horses” and Season 1’s lack of alot of gun violence and action? Why have the far more unique idea of a wife who just refuses to have children and stands on that ground and all that could spring forth out of that, rather than copping out and having her admit she actually wants them while on truth serum? You went to the school dance and you don't fit in and so your knee-jerk reaction is to claim that the cool kids and the beautiful people are dumb and superficial, even while you came in your best tuxedo, asked your mom for those new Jordans, and tried to talk to the cheerleader. In that way the show doesn't really do what so many of the quotes from the interview claim it set out to do which is defy the status quo of this genre and of the people in these relationships, it merely gives the pretense of it. Mr. and Mrs. Smith is not reimagining anything. It's not reinventing, nor challenging anything in the genre or from that film, it's just poorly mimicking both and passing itself off as more because they're not the “beautiful people” and that's pretty shallow.