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Honey,
let’s talk: Jolie in Mr. and Mrs. Smith.
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Is
That a Gun in Your Pocket?
By
Shawn Stone
Mr.
and Mrs. Smith
Directed
by Doug Liman
Don’t
let the explosion- filled ads fool you: Mr. and Mrs. Smith
is a romantic comedy. The film begins with its overly guarded,
squirmy lead characters at a marriage counselor, inadvertently
(and comically) revealing how little they know about each
other—and how much they’re annoyed with each other. Don’t
worry, though, action fans, because the film eventually becomes
as violent and explosive as the red-blooded Jerry Bruckheimer
flick. Only a whole lot smarter.
Mr.
and Mrs. Smith is a very funny romantic comedy, too, primarily
because of the over-the-top violence. The action-film
trappings give director Doug Liman license to revel in the
black-hearted comedy of a husband and wife letting loose their
long-term, pent-up loathing for each other; the fact that
it’s a pair of extremely pretty movie stars in the roles only
adds to the fun. And Liman, who began his career with Swingers,
knows all about the contempt between the sexes.
You’ve probably heard the setup: Husband and wife assassins
aren’t aware that they share the same profession. Brad Pitt
is John Smith; Angelina Jolie is Jane Smith. Both work for
multinational assassination corporations, each brightly organized
along gender and class lines: Pitt’s offices are grungy, and
his coworker is shambling, eternal adolescent Eddie (Vince
Vaughn); Jolie works in the Woolworth Building alongside a
phalanx of beautifully dressed and coiffed young women (including
Kerry Washington and Stephanie March).
Meanwhile, in their oversized, too-expensive, modern suburban
palace, Mr. and Mrs. Smith play out the alternating boredom
and barely concealed contempt of a couple who’ve been together
five or six years and seemingly have nothing in common. The
film takes its time with the details of their unhappy life,
the better to appreciate what happens when an unhappy couple
who feel like killing each other are actually capable of killing
each other.
When the plot mechanics finally bring them into conflict,
the emotions are as potentially lethal as the bullets. It’s
the film’s best joke that these two can only talk honestly
with each other when they start trying to kill each other.
Now, I neither know nor care if Pitt and Jolie are really
banging each other off-screen, but their on-film chemistry
is real and hugely enjoyable. This is probably because their
screen styles balance each other out. Often, Pitt is the dullest
actor in film—especially when paired with similarly low-key
performers. Conversely, Jolie is often, well, just too goddamned
much. When paired with similarly nostril-flaring actors like
Antonio Banderas, Jolie is driven to overact to the point
of unwatchability. Together, however, he pushes a little harder,
and she pulls back a bit. I don’t care if they live happily
ever after in real life, but they ought to make beautiful
music on screen again.
Moving
On
Walk
on Water
Directed
by Eytan Fox
A political thriller of sorts from Israel that gains in power
as it goes along, Walk on Water is about a high-
ranking operative with Mossad who is reassigned to track and
kill a Nazi war criminal. As heavily symbolic as its title
would suggest, the film is also about the schisms between
Germans and Jews, Jews and Arabs, gays and straights, and
old and young. That’s a lot of strife for one movie, yet thanks
to the elegant symmetry of the script and director Eytan Fox’s
sensitive, committed direction, Walk on Water overcomes
an overly humanitarian agenda to unfold an engrossing tale
of denial, guilt, and redemption. Call it a moral thriller.
The operative is Eyal (Lior Ashkenazi), whom we first see
using a hypodermic to assassinate an Arab man traveling with
his wife and child. As gripping as this opening sequence is,
the tone is meditative and the cinematography is moody. Back
home in Tel Aviv, Eytal finds his wife has committed suicide.
By outward appearances, he’s barely ruffled, but his father,
a survivor of the final solution, knows better, and he puts
Eyal on his own pet cause, the assassination of the Nazi,
who may have left Argentina. Eyal, like the other agents of
his generation, is far too concerned about Arab terrorism
to want to waste his deadly talents on an old man who is about
to croak anyway (“I want to get him before God does,” says
his father), but as luck would have it, the Nazi’s granddaughter,
Pia (Caroline Peters), is living on a kibbutz in Israel and
her brother Axel (Knut Berger) is flying in from Germany to
visit her. Eytal goes undercover as the tour guide whom Pia
hires for Axel. Reluctantly, he insinuates himself into the
lives of the sister and brother in the hope that one of them
will reveal the whereabouts of the grandfather. The siblings
respond to his interest in them with trusting enthusiasm.
Though the director’s use of music is obvious and intrusive
(Eyal listens to Bruce Springsteen, Axel cares only for divas)
almost every other element is artfully subdued. Ashkenazi
(who resembles a handsomer Clive Owen, but with less charisma)
is bluntly effective, especially when Eyal takes on some goons
in a Berlin subway. But it’s Berger as the gay and gently
vivacious Axel who is the movie’s standout. Remarkably loving
to just about everybody, Axel has an effect on the macho and
repressed Eyal, even though the operative is disgusted by
Axel’s lifestyle and yuppie humanism. Both men are striving
to follow their conscience, though in vastly different ways,
and their friendship, which evolves at the most beautiful
places in the Holy Land (such as the hypnotically calm Sea
of Galilee) leads to a series of events that sets both men
free from the past. Forget the unfortunate title (and the
final coda that patly ties into it). There’s integrity to
this intrigue.
—Ann
Morrow
Killing
Time at Uday’s
Gunner
Palace
Directed
by Petra Epperlin and Michael Tucker
Meandering, messily edited, and slowed by interludes of boring
filler, Gunner Palace impacts like a stealth bomb,
presenting an unfiltered and discomforting view of the American
experience in Iraq. Shot before the capture of Sadaam Hussein,
the film follows the members of a field artillery unit as
they perform their rotations—as policemen, social workers,
and counter-espionage agents—amid a civilian population. That
the filmmakers (Petra Epperlin and Michael Tucker) are practically
amateurs is the best thing about their tag-along footage:
Shot without fanfare over several months in 2003, these interviews
with average soldiers give them a chance to speak for themselves
without big-media spin doctoring or slick packaging. The filmmakers
are resolutely non-judgmental, and the only flourish is the
optimistic voice-over by Donald Rumsfeld, which dates the
action while providing an ironic counterpoint to the sinking
quagmire that the unit seems to be stuck in. “They can’t grip
it,” says a private of the folks back home. “No one can, unless
they come here.” Which is pretty much the point of the film,
and it’s an important one.
One of Uday Hussein’s “party palaces,” Gunner Palace serves
as the troop’s HQ, rec area and safety zone. The mansion’s
garish excess stands in contrast to the poverty of its surroundings
in Baghdad, where anti-U.S. graffiti is routinely removed
by patrols. Most of the grunts have little understanding of
why they are there. Yet their dedication to duty is admirable,
even though the hero of “the new army” appears to be Johnny
Knoxville rather than John Wayne. One hard-partying private
first class in particular seems to think he’s in a video game,
while a posse of hardcore rappers liken the action to the
mean streets of urban America. All the soldiers live in constant
fear of IEDs (improvised exploding devices), to the point
where a plastic bag stuck to a curb will stop a patrol in
its tracks. Infrared-lit night raids have mixed success; at
one point, it seems innocent people are being sent to prison;
another raid turns up a major stash of weapons and cash. What
seems to be most dispiriting for the soldiers, however, isn’t
the danger, but the feeling that they’ve been forgotten by
the American public—except for the occasional bomb blast to
zip up the nightly news. Nearly two years later, almost nothing
has changed, making this thought-roiling documentary even
more perturbing.
—Ann
Morrow
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