Brad and Angelina's Old-Fashioned Romance

By STEPHEN FARBER
Published: June 5, 2005
Correction Appended
Los Angeles

EVEN the title is evocative: "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" calls to mind a classic Hollywood star vehicle of the past, perhaps even the identically named 1941 movie directed by Alfred Hitchcock. In that picture, two stars of the era, Robert Montgomery and Carole Lombard, played a "squabbling Punch and Judy," according to The New York Times's review. Today's Mr. and Mrs. Smith, played by Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie - as everyone within range of a billboard or bus stop must know by now - are still squabbling. But now they are hired killers, working for rival companies, who set out to assassinate each other.

Almost in spite of itself, the new movie remains a romantic comedy in the tradition that Hitchcock, Howard Hawks and Frank Capra perfected more than half a century ago. Those giant figures of Mr. Pitt and Ms. Jolie in the omnipresent marketing campaign descend from the glamour treatment lavished on major stars in the heyday of Gable and Lombard.

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While movie stars now command far heftier salaries than those legendary performers ever dreamed of - and still have a lock on the nation's magazine covers - it's actually rare to find a movie today that is motored by sheer star power. As films grew more expensive, studios got nervous about entrusting them to mere mortals. Instead, they began to shelter even the biggest stars with special effects, comic-book trappings or familiar franchises. In the latest version of "War of the Worlds," Tom Cruise has to do little more than look terrified or ferociously determined as he battles alien invaders; the main attractions are the flying saucers and the spectacular conflagrations. In the new adaptation of the television series "Bewitched," Nicole Kidman and Will Ferrell are depending on viewers' affection for beloved sitcom characters; the concept is the star, and the actors are really just along for a ride on the broomstick.

Mr. Pitt and Ms. Jolie, of course, will be surrounded by expensive special effects and ferocious gun battles when 20th Century Fox introduces "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" on Friday. But the pair will still have to banter, flirt, display their star wattage - and put their outsize celebrity personas on the line. In that sense this new movie is a lot more demanding than their other recent outings. Mr. Pitt was basically a piece of swinging weaponry in "Troy," and he melted into the wisecracking ensembles of "Ocean's Eleven" and "Ocean's Twelve," while Ms. Jolie struck poses as Lara Croft and spouted an indecipherable accent in her supporting role in the stillborn "Alexander."

In their new movie, the two actors will have to face the music. They're both front and center in a battle-of-the-sexes comedy that depends on movie star magnetism. The question audiences will answer is whether these two highly publicized stars have the sizzle to keep a vital romantic movie tradition alive. And an even more important question hangs in the balance: Does Hollywood still have the know-how to refresh one of its tastiest formulas?

When "It Happened One Night" swept the Oscars in 1934, it established a new kind of romantic comedy, one that depended on a battle of wits between two strong-willed lovers. In that movie, Claudette Colbert played a runaway heiress, and Clark Gable was a cynical newspaper reporter who didn't let on that he knew her real identity. In other words, their relationship was marked by suspicion and deception as well as an undercurrent of desire, and that mixture of attraction and repulsion is what some of the best romantic movies possess. Howard Hawks played many variations on this formula in films like "Twentieth Century" (with John Barrymore as a theatrical impresario and Carole Lombard as the temperamental actress he discovered) and "His Girl Friday" (with Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell as formerly married journalists wrangling in the newsroom).

Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn struck sparks (both on screen and off) in the first movie they made together, "Woman of the Year," and they continued to spar in many of their later romantic comedies, most notably in "Adam's Rib," when they played married lawyers who found themselves on opposite sides of a criminal trial. In some of the most memorable scenes in that movie, their verbal jousts give way to physical jabs, as when he slaps her behind while giving her a rubdown and later when she kicks him viciously in the shins.

In "Pillow Talk" (1959) and again in "Lover Come Back" (1961), Doris Day and Rock Hudson also played professional rivals who engaged in lies, dirty tricks and sadistic humiliations before their inevitable final clinch. A higher level of danger entered the picture in Hitchcock's 1959 caper, "North by Northwest," when Cary Grant exchanged teasing innuendoes with the sultry Eva Marie Saint, who happened to be in cahoots with the spies plotting to kill him.

Stanley Donen's "Charade" (1963) worked its own stylish variations on the Hitchcockian formula. Grant and Audrey Hepburn slipped into a mating dance flecked with menace; she was unsure until the very end of the movie if he was a lover or a murderer in search of the fortune left by her late husband. The movie was criticized at the time for daring to mix lighthearted romantic comedy with macabre violence, an explosive combo that is driven to its illogical conclusion in "Mr. and Mrs. Smith."

It seems likely that Simon Kinberg, the writer of "Mr. and Mrs. Smith," and Doug Liman, the director, had some of these earlier movies - or more recent iterations, like John Huston's "Prizzi's Honor" and Danny De Vito's "War of the Roses" - firmly in mind while they were creating their black comedy. But this new picture highlights the dramatic changes in the cinematic landscape over the last half-century. What could once be expressed entirely in witty repartee and suggestive physical byplay (like Colbert extending her leg to flag down a ride in "It Happened One Night"), or later in the brutal verbiage of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," now requires the kinetic energy of punches, kicks, shooting and stabbing.

Movies have grown darker over the decades, but they've also grown more insecure. Filmmakers and studio executives no longer trust such niceties as dialogue, characterization, style or even movie star charisma to involve viewers in lovers' conflicts. Instead, today's filmmakers feel the need to pump up the volume and ramp up the firepower to make sure they hold the interest of impatient audiences.

Yet Mr. Pitt and Ms. Jolie, though backed by a deafening array of explosions, can't escape their challenge in this one. There is virtually no supporting cast; the only other actor with a significant role, Vince Vaughn, doesn't even get a screen credit. So the two stars, if they succeed in igniting the box office, may not exactly revive the genre of scintillating romantic comedy. But they will have kept it from dying out altogether.

Correction: June 19, 2005, Sunday:

An article on June 5 about the relationship of the current film "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" to the tradition of the Hollywood romantic comedy referred incorrectly to the plot of an earlier movie, "It Happened One Night" (1934). The newspaper reporter played by Clark Gable tells the runaway heiress played by Claudette Colbert that he knows her real identity shortly after he discovers it; he does not pretend that he doesn't know.