Mr. and Mrs. Smith
In a move that may well prove controversial, I hereby bestow the Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie romantic comedy action movie Mr. and Mrs. Smith with four heroine content stars.
There are numerous reasons for these stars, but the single biggest one is that Angelina Jolie's character in the film, "Jane Smith" is a much bigger badass than Brad Pitt's character, "John Smith." The Smiths are married assassins, and the film captures the days before and after they discover each other's true identities. During these days, Jane has a bigger guns, better plans, smarter lines, and better clothes. John has a partner, doofy Vince Vaughn; Jane has a squad of black-clad mini heroines. John makes his kill, drives home, and barely remembers to put his wedding ring back on before going inside. Jane makes hers, gets new drapes, and has dinner on the table at seven. She's just that much cooler. Late in the film, when the Smiths are confessing to each other the number of people they've killed, John says that he doesn't really keep count, but his number is in the high-50s or low 60s. "I've been around the block and all," he says. Jane responds with her number: 312. When John expresses disbelief, she says "some were two at a time."
This film is a rare instance where there are two action leads, male and female, and they are not just equally matched, she's better. Even when they put down the guns and resort to hand-to-hand combat, she is superior. And again, has the better lines. When he says "come to daddy," she counters by hitting him over the head with a teapot and saying, "who's your daddy now?" In both the cold, planned side of killing and the immediate, instinctual side, she prevails.
Jane is also a bigger badass in the emotional realm. She's colder than John and more willing to kill him than he her. When a wistful John tells her she "looked like Christmas morning" the first time he saw her, she responds by telling him he looked like the most beautiful mark she'd ever seen. In a striking reversal, the male half of the warring couple is the one who keeps extending his hand in peace in this film, not the emotional female.
It's true that Jane's character is sexualized. In some scenes, she dresses in a hyper-feminine manner, complete with bondage gear for one hit, high heels almost always. However, it doesn't detract from her efficiency or from her control. Rather than hobbling Jane's character, the times when she wears outlandish getups seem to accent how easy it is for her to do what she does. I think it helps that she's not always dressed that way--she spends most of the film in well-tailored pantsuits, a great turn on the working woman power suit.
As remarkable as Jane's competence and badass potential, however, is the way in which her character turns domesticity on its head. Her cache of weapons is hidden in a secret compartment in her gourmet kitchen. Her cover as an upper class suburban wife is run as efficiently and cleanly as her business operation, with dinners representing all four food groups on the table at the same time every day and constant redecorating. I can't help but think that it must have been an intentional choice on director Doug Liman's (who also directed the Bourne movies) part to emphasize Jane's cover more than John's. It came off to me as subtle commentary on the second shift pulled by career women in general, pulling double duty as domestics and members of the workforce. After all, Jane Smith is the successful CEO of her own tech corporation--why would she refer to herself as a "suburban housewife" if not point a finger at the way that many American women occupy dual roles?
All in all, I love this movie, and I think Angelina Jolie's role in it is a step forward for women in action roles. Part of this is Jolie as an actor--she's just more believably dangerous than all-American Pitt, who hasn't scared me since Fight Club. Much of it, though, has to be attributed to an excellent script by Simon Kinberg (oddly also responsible for the disaster that was X-Men 3) and good direction by Lyman. For me, this one gets added to the heroine content greatest hits.
Comments
I'd been worried about seeing it, this is very reassuring.
Posted by: Skye | January 24, 2007 9:42 PM
Sorry, haven't seen it.
But from what you describe, she sounds more like the stereotype "bitch" your hear in boys club's S&M fantasies/nightmares -- except, unlike Kill Bill for instance, isn't aware of it. Even if it wasn't another version of phallus worship, it's still denegrating and undermining to both sexes.
Or she's just the "man-eater", having the film "saying" she's powerful, but only because she has a symbolic bigger dick than her husband -- she's just an encouragement to patriarch standards of a victorious bad-ass. She's 'cold', closed, 'though', ruthless, paranoid towards her own score to the point of backstabbing, sociopathicly unable to humanly empathize, and seeing everything as a mark to shoot her load on (and c'mon, she kills people for money and coolness!). "She's no pussy". If she were a guy, we wouldn't exactly like him, he'd be a major Dickassowl'.
I still think the positive aspects of female empowerement comes more from a undifferentiated humane perspective due through it's specific appreciation (in which case, "female aspects"), which ultimately undermines male saturated power fantasies to what they are: silly -- instead of trying to even the score by shooting back. In such aspects, I still think films like "Kill Bill" and "Fountain" (and others of course, but can't quite remember) have a better edge on that, being equally a worship of the (symbolic) vagina and the (symbolic) penis (and the mocking of the over-saturated male worship of the phallus -- films like 300).
Kill Bill had it's lead infiltrate the boy's club (and all the aspects of it's mindset, "Pimps and Killas"), sees everything, sees THROUGH everything, win in their own game rules (boys' swordfight), sees and spit in them for the sillyness that it is, and at the last scene -- the only moment where she wears a skirt -- wins against the symbolic over-eager sword with the symbolic sheath. She wins in their own game rules (like Smith), but she ultimately wins for the insistence of the humane and the insistence of empathy in her, no matter how hard she tried to kill them in her "Vixen" role (perhaps their insistence is due to her attempt in "killing" them -- that being from the get-go a empathetic drive towards the boy's club mindset).
The Tao "passive" river-woman won in that scene -- a microcosmos to the macrocosmos of the entire two films -- because she emphatizes with man. Man ultimately loses because he can't see past his own self and his own perspective and views (and also, to make a bit of a romantic pop song, she 'explodes his heart' with her "five points", be it the five points in his body or the five points in the journey she goes through the films -- the empathy to see, to reach to the other side just kills him, as it should and as it always does: love, humanity, empathy and beauty goes to a heart-breaking and surrendering way).
In the end, she gets to "kill" all Bills, from little boys, to little pimps, to Sinatra, to all the way to the big daddy and the idea of the Big Daddy (even Bill Clinton).
Posted by: Elji | March 30, 2007 1:05 AM
You know, I'm honestly just not up for wading through that comment. Especially because you haven't seen the movie in question and we haven't yet posted a review of "Kill Bill," the movie you're actually interested in talking about.
Posted by: Grace | March 30, 2007 8:35 AM
Sorry, just grabbed the nearest random film in my memory where the female lead beats the boys club in their own game rules to counterpoint the figure of "Jane", and ended up extending myself in the example for too long.
I was just saying it's a character caught up in a -- at least -- mind-numbing appreciation of qualities that most men have to make an effort to get out of when they're past their 14th birthday if they wish to grow up for just a bit, and that women usually see right through it. All I'm saying is... well, it's still Lara Croft.
Posted by: Elji | March 30, 2007 9:37 AM
i love this movie. the dialogue is so delicious. the boy and i say, "web of LIES!" all the time. and angelina jolie... *dreamy sigh* how cool is it that her cover job is geek badass? "batman for computers" is how john puts it. LOVE that.
the only things that really bother me:
- her boss is referred to as "father." yuck. and she says she's an orphan - no parents in the traditional sense. this makes her into a kind of athena - super rationalist war goddess. that changes with the character development, but it's still discomforting.
- after john infiltrates her building, she calls for evacuation, and he can't take the shot; he calls her a chickenshit, which is pretty gender neutral, but she calls him a pussy. it's one of the only times in the movie that he really looks angry. :/ with the way she smiles, she could be just saying that because she knows it's a word he'll take as a terrible insult, but she doesn't take it as one herself; but it's a word with so much sexist baggage, i just can't let it pass.
- when they're disclosing secrets during the car chase, she says she's jewish. ummm... why did we have to give her an ethnic identity when they're both so willfully blank? why turn her into an ethnic minority? i'm not sure how i feel about this. i would feel worse if she matched any stereotypes of jewish women (loud, hypersexual, snobby, money-obsessed, bookish, princess-y, etc). but i don't feel great about it.
so i might go down to three stars. but there's so much that's right about this movie, it still holds an ass-kickin' place in my feminist heart.
Posted by: Carrie | November 27, 2007 12:16 PM