Mr. and Mrs. Smith Review: Funny, Clever and Occasionally Romantic

Cast: Donald Glover, Maya Erskine, Paul Dano, Parker Posey, Alexander Skarsgard, John Turturro

Directors: Karena Evans, Hiro Murai, Amy Seimetz, Donald Glover, Christian Sprenger

Writers: Adamma Ebo, Adanne Ebo, Donald Glover, Simon Konberg, Francesca Sloane, Yvonne Hana Yi, Carla Ching, Stephen Glover, Schuyler Pappas

Number of Episodes: 8

Available on: Prime Video

John Smith (Donald Glover) and Jane Smith (Maya Erskine) have issues, which is why halfway into the Mr. and Mrs. Smith, they’re seated on a couch, at a marriage counsellor’s (Sarah Paulson) home office. She is bewildered by how tramelled they are by their jobs as computer software engineers who work together, and suggests a trial period when they’ll pursue independent assignments. The Smiths resist the idea at first, and then grudgingly agree to try. Before they leave, the counsellor gives them a USB drive with recordings of the sessions they’ve had this past month. The recordings were promised in the agreement they’d signed when they came on as clients and the cameras are hidden to ensure no one gets conscious, says the counsellor. Panic flutters across John and Jane’s faces for a brief moment. We know what they know and what the counsellor does not — everything the couple said about their professional life was coded fiction. Mr. and Mrs. Smith are spies, working with a shady, but formidable international agency that has crafted a detailed cover for them, right down to a marriage certificate and a fancy townhouse with Italian tiles, expensive art, a cellar, a luxurious balcony, a kitchen garden, and a safe room.

Co-created by Donald Glover and Francesca Sloane, and loosely based on the 2005 film by the same name starring Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, Mr. and Mrs. Smith is about two people who are brought together by a boss they know only by their greeting, “Hihi”. While pretending to be a married couple, John and Jane Smith are supposed to carry out high-risk expeditions, which range from delivering a cake (it turns out to be a bomb) to going on fours while pretending to be dogs (in order to get close to a mysterious target to whom they have to administer a truth serum), and blowing up beautiful, lakeside cottages in Italy. 

Living With a Spy

In the film, Pitt and Jolie played assassins who were married but didn’t know the scandalous details of their partner’s job until they were tasked to kill each other. Although the premise was compelling, the film fizzled out halfway, struggling to keep the tension and suspense going, but sustaining itself through the glamorous pull of its two stars. Glover and Sloane rearrange the narrative blocks of the original concept by making John and Jane a team, rather than adversaries. The first season effectively builds up to the point where the film begins. There’s no official announcement of a renewal and the show ends on an ambiguous note, leaving the possibility of a second season open while also offering a conclusion to John and Jane’s story arc. 

For eight episodes of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, John and Jane know little about their spouse, but have the whole kit and caboodle about their dangerous errands. As they execute missions as partners, the information from their past lives slowly leak into these conversations, which ensures suspense along with an intimate thread of a friends-to-lovers romance. Glover and Erskine are a neat fit both as partners, but also as individuals who are nursing secrets beneath their seemingly unremarkable facades. 

The show’s supporting cast includes Paul Dano as a nosey, real estate agent and neighbour; John Turturro as one of John and Jane’s targets; Michaela Coel as a rival; and Parker Posey as another Jane Smith who, along with her partner (also John Smith), carries out “super” high risk missions. Posey’s Jane, whose cheerfulness underscores something sinister, is particularly unsettling. 

While John and Jane seem to approach their undercover life as a simple job, the audience is clued early on that the world of this show is not one with guaranteed happy endings. Mr. and Mrs. Smith begins with Alexander Skarsgard sitting on a porch with Eiza Gonzalez, drinking their “last bottle” of wine before the two are gunned down. Later, another Smith couple tell John and Jane that while one’s partner can be “replaced”, the process isn’t quite as straightforward as a divorce. For Smith marriages, it seems to be very literally till death do us part. 

An Undercover Marriage

John is more comfortable with his past leaking into his treacherous new life. It doesn’t take much for him to admit to Jane that he is attached to his widowed mother. Jane is more reserved, though she does confess that she’s brought her cat Max into this new, undercover life. There are hints that her dynamic with her father is dysfunctional, and that she lost her mother at an early age. Glover and Erskine’s chemistry does not have that clothe-ripping intensity, but they are riveting as a fake married couple who eagerly slip into sexual intimacy even while holding up barriers to emotional closeness. 

There is ample negotiation for love amidst the shootouts, drugging, macheting and kidnapping. John struggles with his self-esteem, and Jane has a tendency to exhibit over-rational tendencies. She’s often controlling, he’s impulsive; she enjoys the adrenaline rush, he dreams of having a family. Even within the idiosyncrasy of their unusual marriage, typical gendered notions rear their plain-looking heads. John is a mama’s boy who frequently feels emasculated by his strong-minded wife. Jane’s indifferent attitude is characterised as sociopathic, though it isn’t clear whether that is a medical diagnosis or just Jane fulfilling the Asian stereotype of being hard on herself. Adding to their challenges is Hihi who seems to be playing one Smith against the other. 

Without giving major spoilers, in the end, as the two are locked in a moment of mutual truth telling, you realise how sweet these glimpses of respite are. The intellectual detailing of the rife between the two infringes upon how swoony and sexy the series otherwise could be — there is romance here, but not the rosy, rom-com kind. Rather, it’s a self-serious and afflicted kind that is bolstered by trauma bonding and accommodation of the other’s smaller quirks. But then, what is love, no, marriage, if not a good-fashioned obliging of these uglier ingredients?