There’s a kinky, if overdetermined, charge that comes from watching Angelina Jolie dress in a hot leather dominatrix outfit to get close to and kill one of her targets, or from watching Pitt virilely strip off his shirt (again). But the fun of the film is that it’s also, maybe, true stars have marital troubles just like Us. “It probably feels like you’re the only ones going through this,” the offscreen marriage therapist tells the couple earnestly at the beginning of the film, “but I’ll tell you something: there are millions of couples that are experiencing the same problems.” The joke is that this is false – most couples aren’t concealing careers as assassins, to say nothing of the fact that most people aren’t married to universally idolized male or female sex symbols. The film is a multi-layered, interlocking celebrity fantasy, which caters to both the desire to be the wonderful, exciting Pitt and Jolie, and the voyeuristic desire to experience schadenfreude at their manifest failure to be wonderful and exciting. A couple whose perfect life turns out to be a complete fiction that resonates, right?Īnd this is where, in hindsight, the frothy by-the-numbers Mr & Mrs Smith approaches a kind of genius. Now that Pitt and Jolie are separating in turn, Mr & Mrs Smith seems prescient in various ways (though not in its portrayal of Jolie as a woman who hates children, obviously). Mr & Mrs Smith was also the set on which Pitt and Jolie met they became the most famous celebrity couple in the world following Pitt’s separation from Jennifer Aniston in 2005.

What if two extraordinary people pretended to be normal, boring, suburbanites, who marinate in quiet desperation and bitter lack of fulfillment? The conceit of the film is the same as the marketing of the film. And that is precisely what they’re doing in real life as well, where Brad Pitt is pretending to be John Smith pretending to be John Smith, and Angelina Jolie is Jane Smith pretending to be Jane Smith. Jane and John have both set up complete alternative identities as cover stories they’re acting out their lives.

The joke is, more or less intentionally, meta. “Then who gave you away at our wedding?” John demands.

Angelina jolie inmr and mrs. smith