Two hopeful spies who are rejected by other agencies find one last opportunity. With whom? Someone who pays well enough for the details not to matter. The pair meet on their first day of marriage, posing as a couple in order to better work together under cover. Donald Glover and Maya Erskine star as John and Jane Smith.
Don’t confuse this for the 2005 movie starring Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt. It’s “inspired by” that film, but the two barely have anything in common. And that’s fine. They’re both good, but in very different ways. Where that film followed two married spies who hid their jobs from each other, this one sees the pair of spies knowingly enter the marriage as a cover.
That’s not an enormous difference, but what makes the series truly unique is how dark the humor and drama delve. There are strokes of loneliness and desperation that feed into its quietly building tension, that make Jane and John feel strangely alone in this New York City. It captures both the aggressive sense of privacy needed to maintain your personal space in New York, and the resulting sense of isolation that can become inescapable when you’re surrounded by everyone, but no one in particular.
Episodes contain missions, ranging from a simple theft to arms running…but each turns into something different. A mission to a ski resort to observe a couple, bug their phones, and intercept a call is also a contemplation on the stages of relationships, a consideration of reality TV addiction, and a jarringly sudden touch on fear of loss – itself disarmed with a wildly inappropriate joke.
The action is built on a familiarization of suspense, how normal moments can grow tense in ways that we’ve all experienced, but gateway into violence that we haven’t. It creates a dissonant experience of realism and surrealism. The situation is familiar. The result isn’t. It’s all anchored by the humanism of showrunner Francesca Sloane’s writers room, but with the hinges oiled and loosened by directors like Hiro Murai (“Atlanta”) and Amy Seimetz (“The Girlfriend Experience”).
It can feel like looking at an Andrew Wyeth or Edward Hopper. The reality is recognizable, we could step into that moment and feel all the emotions of it, but that underlying tension, the escalation of the unknown, that’s existential, the kind of thing that – whether real or not – we’re built not to look at long, for our own good.
At its core are these two isolated people, whose job is to keep looking, to keep existing on that line, who find in each other some sort of refuge and safe space. The stranger things become, the more they rely upon each other. How much of their isolation is anxiety, and how much is sociopathy? If it’s the former, where’s the difference when their job entails murder? If it’s the latter, then why do they need each other?
The world outside them is so strange, so heartless, so threatening, and they are tasked to go into it for their own talents in being strange and heartless and threatening. We lose our window back to whatever’s normal. We just know they find solace in each other, and in that kind of world that makes us find solace in them.
Both Erskine and Glover are phenomenal in this. It’s a dialogue-driven show, but there isn’t much that’s strictly meant to be funny. As it gets toward the middle episodes, there are some breakaway comedic scenes, but they’re more punctuation than feature. They can feel a little forced sometimes, but the pair of them are too talented to let anything slide away from good. The bulk of the humor comes from situations that would normally be directed toward comedy but are instead shifted toward the unsettling. We laugh because these actors are extraordinarily funny, but also because the show generates nervousness to spare. It’s these moments where the dialogue feels most natural and unforced. It’s left to Erskine and Glover to make these scenes human enough that we find them funny, their foibles comforting and their inside jokes endearing even as they wade through horror.
The supporting cast is perfect for a series that slips between as many cracks as this one does: Paul Dano, Parker Posey, Ron Perlman, Sarah Paulson, Wagner Moura, John Turturro, Alexander Skarsgard, Eiza Gonzalez. Every one of them can play comedy and drama, find where the two meet and dissolve into each other, can turn small talk into comfort or discomfort, and comfort into love, discomfort into threat.
Few shows achieve this sense of us against the universe, because it poses the world itself as difficult to know. Stories tend to want you to know their world and feel comfortable navigating your way through that world. The world of “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” is hostile, too recognizable, too close. Not horrible, just…strange and overwhelming and buzzing, with occasional horrible things in it. A reflection isn’t an escape. There’s a sense of dissociation, of the spareness of the world outside, of entering into a place that’s more hostile than agreed, of a broken promise of norms that were only stories anyway.
There’s a reverberating echo to “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” that feels like what the world can feel like. It’s alarming in a way that expects us not to raise alarm. It’s not what we agree to. It separates us from ourselves. What was real flecks away like paint that hasn’t been maintained. That raw nerve faintly pressed, that way of harnessing our anxiety and turning it away from kindness, of whispering it toward that dissonance, toward that dissociation, and finally toward harm – that is the modern feeling of the world “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” captures, perhaps better than any show I’ve seen. The romance works because it’s the only place that kindness can still thrive, and it works for us because we desperately need to know that kindness can still thrive.
Not every piece of the show works, but what does is brilliant, unsettling, engrossing art. Yet for how disquieting it is, there is a strange comfort in it, a way it recognizes the world at its worst and agrees that we’re not mistaken for wanting something different from it, that we’re not alone when we start to lose sight of what that was.
“Mr. and Mrs. Smith” is on Amazon Prime.
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Gabriel Diego Valdez 