By D.K. Holm
June 14, 2005
[nota bene: The following column, by necessity, contains some spoilers! If you don't want to know the ending of the movies mentioned, don't read on.]
Lethal Marriage
MR. AND MRS. SMITH
One of the difficulties of reviewing movies, at least semi-professionally, is that it's difficult to read other movie reviews. And that's one of my favorite pastimes. Unfortunately, if I read columns by my favorite writers or try to research a new movie, I'm either in danger of being infected consciously or unconsciously with their observations or their insights will simply nullify the need for me to add my voice to the croaking chorus. Generally, if I can, I try to wait several months and catch up with reviews either after I've written mine, or months or even years later in collections, not that it's easy to hold off given the pressure to stay on top of what is happening now.
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Therefore, I have little idea what the critical community thinks of MR. AND MRS. SMITH. I know that the movie made over 50 million dollars this last weekend. I have heard rumblings of dissent. And I would guess that most of the reviewers didn't like the film. But I haven't read a single one. There were a few profiles and meditations on Jolie published a few weeks back, and I read a couple of those, but as I type this I have no idea what the national reaction is to this film. I find myself continually more out of step with my fellow critics, at least the local ones, who loathe films I find agreeable and who praise middlebrow pabulum that should be making them angry. One runs the risk of sounding naïve or missing something really obvious by living in a cone of internet silence, but at the same time one can respond to a film as the man in the orchestra seat does, with a certain amount of innocent, with new eyes, with a mind free of the influences of other reviewers who seek to set an agenda.
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So, as a red blooded American guy who likes hot chicks and guns, I can say that MR. AND MRS. SMITH turned me on. It's hot. The film is funny, action filled, and has two attractive leads. At the same time MR. AND MRS. SMITH makes some interesting comments about the state of American marriage. It also has some interesting flaws that also point the way to some of the things wrong with Hollywood's big summer blockbusters.
For one thing, Jolie is very exciting, not just because she tarts herself up as a dominatrix, but because she is sharp and competent, yet also weirdly flawed. As Mr. Smith says to her at one point, "There's no air around you. No room for error." I think a lot of American men can relate to that sentiment. She's attractive and repellent at the same time.
Somehow, between ALEXANDER and this film, Jolie (who, you will recall, is an Oscar winner) suddenly went from something of a joke to a thespian taken very seriously by the media, with a frenzy that is accorded to only a few public figures, and it wasn't just due to her home wrecking rep. Her filmography is not all that distinguished. She was miscast in LARA CROFT. Twice. Her films tend to be so bad that you wonder why she is in the business in the first place, aside from the high rewards that narcissism craves and the "easy" money.
On the other hand, until now Jolie hasn't been able to command the high quality directors the way a Tom Cruise can. But as far as her popularity is concerned, it's almost as if America has willed itself into needing a dynamic wife figure, great with both the curtains and the cartridges, a kind of nightmare version of Martha Stewart.
MR. AND MRS. SMITH begins with surprising quietude. John Smith and his wife are seeing a shrink, trying to figure out how the air leaked out of their union. In flashbacks we learn that they met in South America under mysterious circumstances, and they bond on the dance floor under a gathering storm, a rather obvious but still appealing harbinger of what is to follow.
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They are very competitive with each other, making explicit what is in fact a not uncommon factor in modern marriages, a weird race to best the partner. The movie (credited to writer Simon Kinberg, who wrote XXX) explores the alienation that sets into a marriage when the partners step back into their own little boxes and don't share. The funny twist of MR. AND MRS. SMITH is that if they had been honest from the start they would have been much happier with each other. There is a remarkable cynicism just under the surface of this movie and I can imagine married couples being a little uncomfortable while watching it. "Happy endings are stories that haven't finished yet," says at one point. That their House Beautiful goes up in smoke is both an appeal to the Yuppie nightmare and a nod to an almost Zen-like cleansing of materiality (ultimately unsuccessful for hired killers).
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When the future Mrs. Smith first sees John Smith in Bogotà, she looks at him with a mix of lust and relief, like a grifter making out a mark. It's a beautiful look from Jolie, and in fact she has never been more beautifully photographed than in the movie (by Bojan Bazelli). In fact, later in the film the DP, consciously or not, quotes a shot from NORTHSIDE 777 (one of my favorites), when we see Pitt at the door saying that "we need to talk" and a train goes by in the background.
Other movies that MR. AND MRS. SMITH "quotes" include SHOWGIRLS (the hit she does at the start dressed like a dome), Eyes Wide Shut (for its explorations of the fantasy lives of an upper class alienated couple).
Before I went into the film the publicist told me that MR. AND MRS. SMITH was "WAR OF THE ROSES crossed with TRUE LIES," and that is basically true, with a little GROSSE POINT BLANK thrown in. There is even a reference to THE SWIMMER, consciously or not, when Mr. Smith chases after his wife through the multiple back yards of his neighbors. There's even a KING OF COMEDY mother, unseen but audible upstairs at the ramshackle home of Mr. Smith's boss, a somewhat wasted Vince Vaughn.
There is also excellent music by John Powell, who is coming to be my favorite movie composer in the wake of Bernard Herrmann's death so many years ago. Pino Donaggio and Patrick Doyle also do great scores, but I'm just catching up to Powell, who did the two BOURNEs, THE ITALIAN JOB, and FACE / OFF (I probably would have noticed him earlier if I went to more animated films — he also did SHREK). His music is catchy and inventive and a real complement to the car chase movies he ends up doing.
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Doug Liman, MR. AND MRS. SMITH's director, did the first BOURNE. Paul Greengrass directed the second and I've preferred that second one, finding something kind of magical about its kinetic power, blending clear yet busy editing with Powell's music. I happened to interview Liman several years ago around the time that SWINGERS came out, and was rather surprised at some of the directors he named as influences. For example, Richard Donner loomed large in his pantheon. Liman said that in SWINGERS when they were shooting the scene with the boys driving to Vegas they couldn't figure out where to put the camera, on the car, or in a different car in front. Liman turned to the opening of LETHAL WEAPON 2 and got his answer (in a leading car — you get an authentic bounce).
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I think that Liman does a good job here (he's great at freeway chases), and what ills befall the film lie in its script, which endured several rewrites and different exploratory endings. In fact, the trailer is a little bit misleading trailer, as the Smiths don't really end up assigned to kill each other, which actually would have solved some of the narrative problems the film descends into and would have made their eventual reuniting much sweeter. The main flaw in the film is that there is no villain. In the entire last sequence the Smiths are fighting off masked, anonymous tactical drones. You never really know who is behind these guys. The power of life and death appears to reside with higher ups we never see. There may have been a villain in an earlier version of the story, but the absence of one in the finished product makes the Smith's actual profession a little disquieting. We might accept them a little more if there was someone more ruthless, someone presented as legitimately evil out there above them, as an impediment. Then when they reunite the pair would have a specific, personified nemesis, and a goal, something to overcome. As it stands now the film descends into relatively mindless shooting and special effects. Still, before that time comes MR. AND MRS. SMITH has an unexpected and subtle complexity that is all too unhappily divorced from its conventional Hollywood pyrotechnics.
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Joan Crawford is amazing. That is the only conclusion to be reached after seeing five of Crawford's middle career films, when she was making the transition from MGM to Warner, all part of the THE JOAN CRAWFORD COLLECTION (Warner, five films, five discs, six sides, $49.95, Tuesday, June 14, 2005). A companion box, The Bette Davis Collection, will be reviewed next week. Crawford had a lot of rivals in Hollywood and appears to have had a steely competitive edge. She also seems to be a "classic" Hollywood star, the definition of glamour. Not young, she couldn't play coquets, though she could manifest a sexual allure. Instead, she gave herself over, at least as far as the public knew, to her fans, who even named her, and whom she catered to with her mostly soap opera based accounts of women sacrificing herself to the point of masochism — theoretically she should be the favorite actress of Lars Von Trier. Instead, public fans from Andrew Sarris to Guy Maddin have sung her praises, and now, we see, rightfully so.
Like many common viewers trying to fill in gaps in their patchwork, amateur viewing history, I just assumed that Bette Davis was "better" than Crawford. While Davis was the serious actress, Crawford was the Hollywood product, the woman who allowed herself to be manipulated by the industry, who thrived on its public elements, who enjoyed a sense of entitlement. In the modern gothic WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE?, Robert Aldrich famously, in Andrew Sarris's notable review, brought to fruition the extremes of their screen personas, Davis the ravaged sadist, Crawford the trembling masochist.
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But a closer look at Crawford as provided by these five films gives a much fuller definition of her career. The boxed set kicks off with THE WOMEN (1939), a George Cukor directed adaptation of a popular play by Claire Booth Luce. Focused on marriage, divorce, affairs, and catty gossip its meant to be a "revealing" look behind the changing room door, but in fact is kind of an extreme, misogynistic farrago, which I suppose only a "man's woman" type woman could write. Anyway, it is somewhat misleading because it doesn't represent the Crawford who is to follow in the rest of the set. Here she is the perfume counter clerk who ensorcelled the husband (unseen, like all the film's men) of Norma Shearer's Mary Haines (possibly named after Cukor's best friend). In POSSESSED, Crawford, for example, shoots down a lover with a gun like Bette Davis in THE LETTER.
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Naturally, they were rivals at MGM and only have two scenes in which they appear together, both of them feeling rather muted. I am guessing that Crawford didn't feel that she was quite right for the role of a scheming broad (she is surely too old for it) and in fact may have lead to her departure from MGM when she finally could (this is a wild guess; I haven't read any Crawford bios). The movie gives her a bathtub scene and a cat fight, but also a great parting shot as she returns to the "counter" after locking horns with the film's other bitches.
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THE WOMEN is not a new disc but it looks good and has a number of secondary features that would probably have been more Joan oriented if she had been the true star of the show and if the disc had been originally prepared for the set. For the record the extras are include "From the Ends of the Earth" and "Hollywood: Style Center of the World," the kind of contemporaneous MGM promotional product that TCM uses as filler, and all the film's music cues, though without the visuals. There is also an alternative version of THE WOMEN's central fashion show sequence (in color in the actual movie) and among the trailers cleverly is one for THE OPPOSITE SEX, the 1950s version of the play, with music and men. The other revelation of this film, by the way, is co-star Paulette Goddard, who is ravishing.
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Next up chronologically is MILDRED PIERCE (1945), which Crawford made at Warner, with Michael Curtiz directing. Here we get the Crawford of the arched, sculpted eyebrows, of the slanted shadows covering the top of her face, the self-sacrificing mother who is doing everything for her surviving daughter (it's interesting how often Crawford's characters suffer the loss of offspring while she herself adopted children in real life).
PIERCE looks fabulous — it's one of those remarkable black and white films that feel as if they were shot in color.
PIERCE is on the A side; on the B side is a TV biography of Crawford which fills in some of the biographical gaps of Crawford's life, though this disc was released before the box set was conceived.
New to DVD are the next three films, beginning with HUMORESQUE from 1946, made a year after PIERCE and reuniting her with some of the same team.
Again, Crawford is actually secondary to the story; the film is really about James Garfield's Paul Boray, a self-made violinist whom Crawford's hardened socialite Helen Wright falls for but whom she can't shake from his devotion to his first mistress, music.
HUMORESQUE is famous partially for its music, partly for its frank sexuality, and also for the convoluted way the filmmakers faked Garfield's playing (basically the only thing that's him is his head). But here we get a taste of the predator Crawford, setting her sights on Garfield's Boray and never letting up, knowing that she can go a certain distance with him easily. She is also an alcoholic, is in a loveless marriage, and has been hiding from herself the truth that she has been on the edge for years. All it takes is Garfield's presence in her life to tip her toward the emotionalism viewers were familiar with from Crawford.
HUMORESQUE comes with a small clutch of supplements, the most important of which is a small new feature about the music of the film with four or five experts discussing what a "humoresque" is and how unusual the film is for presenting such a driven musician.
Keeping the run going, the next film is POSSESSED, which may be the most unusual film in the set. Half sudser, half noir, it begins like the end of an Antonioni film, with a woman walking the naked streets of dawn alone. Crawford's Louise Howell Graham is in a fugue state and the rest of the movie tells in flashback how she got there.
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Like LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN and THE RECKLESS MOMENT, it's set in a woodsy world of lakes and trees and enormous roomy houses and ungrateful youngsters. The difference here is that Crawford's Graham is legitimately insane, having hallucinations and paranoid delusions, just the thing for the suddenly Freudianized post-war Hollywood. Raymond Massy is the patriarch industrialist of the household in the original "nurse who gets the widowed man" story. The real love of her life though is Van Heflin's David Sutton. As Drew Casper points out in his breathless audio commentary track, here Heflin is playing the role usually accorded the woman, i.e., he's an homme fatale, seductive yet elusive. Having no authentic interior life and being cat nip to the opposite sex he is the definition of the female starlet, a twisted mirror of the carefully constructed Crawford persona.
I found Casper's yak track a little light on content unlike some of his earlier efforts. He seems to be running constantly behind the film, almost catching up, and then distracting himself (and the auditor) with a verbal slip of some kind before falling behind again. Still, he knows a lot about the film, and about Crawford, with whom he spent several hours one day some time in the 1970s.
The other supplement is a short featurette linking POSSESSED to film noir, a slightly interesting exercise, which hauls out some of the same familiar faces as appear on the Warner noir DVDs.
Especially interesting to noir and Crawford fans is the final film in the set, THE DAMNED DON'T CRY from 1950 (the title has little to do with the film's story). Loosely based on the career of Virginia Hill, who later hooked up with gangster Bugsy Siegel, his equivalent here played by Steve Cochran, the film charts the career of a Mildred Piercy working class woman who dumps her husband after the traffic death of her son and begins to try and find a way to rise in the world. She ends up a gangster's moll, and he (played by the oleaginous David Brian) sends her on a mission to get close to Cochran's Siegel clone. Again, the story is told in flashback, as if a typical Crawford character can only be considered retrospectively.
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DAMNED comes with what could have been the most interesting supplement, a commentary track by the film's aged director, Vincent Sherman, with whom Crawford collaborated twice more and with whom she had an affair. Unfortunately, Sherman adheres to the code of Hollywood and gives up nothing, basically just describing the obvious to us between long gaps in his discourse. The other supplement is another short featurette on Crawford.
All five movies come in full frame transfers with English, Spanish, and French subtitles and Dolby Digital 2.0 mono. All five films come in keep cases with original posters or other contemporaneously promotional art on the cover.
Crawford emerges then as a much more complex figure than I used to think in my pre-Crawford ignorance. Like a true star she collaborated with her studios and her directors in forging her image, yet at the same time she wasn't afraid to shed the trappings of glamour for provocative shots, such as the opening of POSSESSED, in which she appears with out makeup. Like Dietrich's Crawford's face seemed to change after the 1930s, becoming more angular, sharp, incisive, and matching Dietrich in prominent eyebrows. The fact of the matter is that Crawford is very attractive, with mature eyes, a man's cheekbones, and a little girls buck teeth. She's everything blended into one fascinating face.
Letters
From Samantha Walker:
"Read your SITH review: Well, yer just WRONG. The plot and politics of the story, as you say, have always been cool … BUT … it sucks! Really! The acting is horrid, the dialogue is horrid, the 'love' scenes are laughable. She's a whiney little bitch and he's completely devoid of emotion. No chemistry at all. How can you give a damn about what happens to them? If his performance is so great in these movies, why isn't he a star by now? No one knows who the fuck he is! 'Cause he sucks! The huge budget and all and they can't even manage to give Obi Wan's hair a muss after fighting over exploding lava and jumping all over? WTF is this? A hair commercial? Don't have a lot of sympathy for Anakin getting toasted as his motivations are weak and it is never made clear how strong the pull must have been. … especially to continue to the Dark side after his one (and only) motivation dies anyway. Huh? And what about all the BS with her hiding her pregnancy, resigning from the Senate and going away to have the kid? And then she's walking around all pregnant and NO one says a thing. No scandal, no questions, no NOTHING! And how are they all surprised when it's twins? With all the hi-tech, they had to have known! And what about Yoda looking like a freakin' green bumblebee when he fights? And the fact that he EXPLAINS everything! He's meant to be a dignified character, a paragon of the Jedi. Not a little bitch-boy who talks too much and forwards/explains the plot. He is not WISE in this movie. And Obi Wan spouting flippant little statements? Very un-Jedi-like. That's what Han Solo characters are for! This movie needed one of those!
And landing the aerodynamically impossible half-ship? That they seem very pleased with although a bunch of their own folks are KILLED in the process. And the impossibly swift Gila monster or whatever the @$%&@% Obi Wan was riding. No freakin' WAY!
Not to mention ripping off LOTR and PJ. Nice try, guys.
What about tying up one of the BIG inconsistencies ie: explaining how a technologically advanced society at the end of this movie becomes a third world society at the beginning of A NEW HOPE? But the main point is that the dialogue and acting are SO, SO, SO BAD! The entire purpose was to get from 'point a' to 'point b' story wise. Fine, but have a little flippin' dignity while doing it! Watching endless laser-battles with occasional close-ups of BAD actors saying BAD lines does nothing to make me sympathetic to their Cause. It makes me LAUGH! And I want them ALL to DIE as soon as possible!
The Wookie planet did kick ass, though."
And incidentally, if you are interested in KILL BILL, you might find my new book, KILL BILL: AN UNOFFICIAL CASEBOOK useful. It is now available in fine bookstores everywhere, or from Amazon.
And if you are interested in what I sound like, I can be heard on KBOO radio (90.7 FM) the second and the fourth Wednesday of the month, at 9 AM in the morning (Pacific Standard Time) on Ed Goldberg's show MOVIE TALK, which is available via streaming audio (in 20 Kbps Stereo). The next broadcast is Wednesday, June 22, at 9 AM, Pacific Standard Time.
COMING SOON: WAR OF THE WORLDS, more Asian action films, several STAR TREKS, and more!
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