Undercover ’adulting’ poignantly apropos

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This article was published 10/02/2024 (920 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

‘The way things are in the world right now, I’m happy we have a job.”

In Mr. and Mrs. Smith, a sharply funny, oddly poignant series now streaming on Prime Video, the characters we know only as John and Jane Smith (Donald Glover and Maya Erskine) start out a bit adrift.

It could be a millennial thing. The precariousness of the gig economy, the high cost of housing, their own emotional ambivalence — it all means that the traditional markers that might have defined adulthood for this generation’s parents and grandparents (steady work with one company, home ownership, marriage and children) feel out-of-reach or impossible — or maybe even undesirable. This is a demographic group so uncertain about adulthood that when they find themselves doing mundane but necessary things like going to the hardware store or doing their taxes, they call it “adulting.”

When John and Jane get hired by a mysterious corporation for “high-risk” work, suddenly they’re adulting like crazy. Not only are they posing as a happily married husband and wife, each with a successful career — something in software engineering — they’ve been installed in a luxuriously furnished Manhattan brownstone with a rooftop garden, a plunge pool and one of those fancy taps just for filling pots.

It’s clear, though, that our titular Mr. and Mrs. Smith feel like impostors in their new adult lives, and not just because they’re spies.

The series’ espionage stuff is a ton of goodlooking fun — and it brings in some terrific guest stars, including John Turturro, Sharon Horgan, Parker Posey, Ron Perlman and Michaela Coel. There are flashy action sequences — car chases, explosions, knife fights. There are beautiful locations — a remote house on Lake Como, a black-tie auction in New York, an upscale ski resort in the Dolomites. But John and Jane’s missions remain mostly beside the point. We have no real idea about what the pair is up to or what the geopolitical stakes might be.

The eight-part series feels more like a marriage dramedy, as John and Jane’s playacting as married grownups becomes increasingly serious, increasingly funny and — sometimes — unexpectedly sweet.

John and Jane’s shadowy employer has a kind of Parallax View way of recruiting and operating. The two have been matched as fake husband and wife by answering a series of questions posed by a machine. Their often-evasive answers reference some former instability — difficulty holding down work, a dishonourable discharge, family estrangement, issues with commitment, antisocial tendencies. Still, they both like Korean barbecue, and that’s a start.

The series is a loose adaptation of a 2005 movie famously starring Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, whose real-life on-set affair became a huge tabloid story.

Glover and Erskine can’t match the molten erotic energy that was mid-oughts Brangelina — but then they’re not trying to. They’re trying for something trickier, something more relatable and realistic.

Jane and John’s first mission feels like an awkward, getting-to-know-you first date. Thrown together by their cover story, they must figure out how to live and work together, and there’s something touching about their wary approaches to intimacy. The series keeps things deliberately unglamorous as John and Jane negotiate dirty dishes in the sink, handle farting-in-bed protocol, and — in one standout episode — try to make “couple friends” (with hilariously awful results).

The Mr. and Mrs. Smith movie might be the obvious parallel here, but another touchstone could be The Americans. (Fans of that show might recognize in John and Jane’s first corpse disposal scene a hideously familiar crunching noise.) One of The Americans’ central questions was: If you go through the day-to-day motions of pretending to be married, do you end up, in some fundamental sense, actually being married?

To go by John and Jane’s interpersonal conflicts, it certainly seems that way, as the pair quickly progress from comic bickering to some soul-destroying Marriage Story-style yelling matches.

“Vows make me uncomfortable,” Jane says at one point. But even if John and Jane, like many in their generation, have a hard time imagining they might stick with the same job or the same relationship for decades, a brief scene ominously suggests they might not have much choice.

In their pretend roles as Mr. and Mrs. Smith, they have inadvertently made a genuine lifelong commitment — to the company and to each other. How long those lives might last is, of course, a whole other question, and one that makes this series such dark, slippery, unpredictable fun.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca