The very real sham marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Smith
Donald Glover and Francesca Sloane’s remake is in some ways the inverse of the 2005 original.
“Marriage is a house you build, and sometimes your tastes change,” a neighbor (Paul Dano) says to John Smith (Donald Glover) near the end of the new series Mr. and Mrs. Smith (created by Glover and Francesca Sloane; streaming on Amazon Prime). The neighbor is trying to figure out the relationship between John and his wife, Jane (Maya Erskine). He’s been told they are software engineers who recently moved to New York City, but he can sense that something doesn’t add up.
That is because John and Jane are undercover agents for a nebulous agency, playing at being married to keep their cover. The show borrows its basic DNA from the 2005 movie by the same name, but the assumptions about love and work that give the premise its satirical edge have changed in the intervening 20 years.
In the original movie, Mr. and Mrs. Smith (Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie) are rich, bored, and hiding their secret identities even from each other. When they are assigned the job of killing each other by their respective agencies, their pent-up ennui erupts in gunfire and explosions, reigniting their passion with each volley of bullets. The humor works because this vision of the American Dream—beautiful home, financial security, stable marriage—is so taken for granted it starts to feel like a trap that needs to be escaped.
