the dance is all

Rating: 10/10 (10 June 2005)

Until you become accustomed to the overweening beauty on screen, it's hard to watch Mr. and Mrs. Smith. With all of the teeth and pouty lips, the blue eyes and bravado, you don't know exactly where to rest your eyes. But the film soon takes care of that, sweeping you into the center of a cyclone that rages around this couple. Bullets and one-line zingers fly, and, before long, two competing agents are at odds--and each other's throats. Their violence would be offensive if it were not a metaphor for the slings and arrows of every relationship, and so we come to root for Jane and John--the perfect prototypes for those who "deserve" the American dream. In several scenes, the action takes a backseat to their bickering, reinforcing the notion that the Smiths aren't fighting against outside forces so much as they are the seemingly impenetrable walls they've built between them.
Jolie is the razor against which Pitt sharpens himself, proving to audiences that he can, in fact, act in the comedic vein (a side of him we happily glimpsed in his stint on Friends). The tension between them is increased, I think, because of the action sequences, and is at its height when they are in the still eye of the storm of firefight around them. It is here that both realize that they do love one another, that the only way back to one another is through learning to "dance" together again, though to a different tune.
In the film's final action sequence, as they "dodge bullets" once again, Liman plays the song from their first meeting. This last scene is shot in slow motion, and each balletic movement shows that in the center of the storm, the dance between two people who have finally found each other's rhythm again is all.
And so, at heart, this movie is a love story. But all around that love story swirls action, comedy, and, yes, the sexy sizzle we've been hearing about for months now.
In the final words of John Smith: this movie is a "ten."