The hidden “adult” is the Winnipeg Free Press

“The way the world is right now, I'm glad we have a job.”

year Mr. and Mrs. SmithIn the sharply funny, surprisingly moving series currently airing on Prime Video, the characters we know only as John and Jane Smith (Donald Glover and Maya Erskine) start to get a little lost.

It could be a millennial thing. The instability of the gig economy, the high cost of housing, their own emotional ambivalence—all mean that the traditional markers that might define adulthood (steady work with one company, home ownership, marriage, and children) feel out of reach or impossible for this generation's parents and grandparents. – or maybe even unwanted. This demographic is so insecure about adulthood that they engage in mundane but necessary activities like going to the hardware store or doing taxes, calling it “adulting.”

When John and Jane are hired for a “dangerous” job by a mysterious corporation, they suddenly become insane. Not only are they happily married, but each has a successful career—something in software engineering—they've settled into a luxuriously furnished Manhattan brownstone with a rooftop garden, a plunge pool, and one of those cool faucets. for filling pots.

However, it's clear that in their new adulthood, our titular Mr. and Mrs. Smith feel like frauds, not just because they're spies.

The series' espionage stuff is great fun – and it boasts some great guest stars, including John Turturro, Sharon Horgan, Parker Posey, Ron Perlman and Michaela Coel. There are bright action sequences – car chases, explosions, knife fights. There are beautiful places – 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 are largely unimportant. We have no real idea what this pair is thinking or what the geopolitical stakes might be.

The eight-episode series feels like a marriage drama, as John and Jane's play as a married couple becomes increasingly serious, funny and, at times, unexpectedly sweet.

John and Jane have a kind of shady employer Parallax view recruitment and employment practices. By answering a series of questions posed by the machine, the two were identified as fake husband and wife. Their often evasive responses refer to past instability—difficulty holding down a job, dishonorable dismissal, estrangement from family, commitment issues, antisocial tendencies. However, they both enjoy Korean barbecue, and that's a start.

The series is a light adaptation of the popular 2005 film starring Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, whose real-life story became a major tabloid story.

Glover and Erskine don't match Brangelina's molten erotic energy, but they don't try. They strive for something more complex, relatable and authentic.

Jane and John's first mission feels like an awkward, dating first date. Combined with their cover stories, they must figure out how to live and work together, and there's something touching about their cautious approaches to intimacy. The series deliberately keeps things raunchy, as John and Jane reconcile the dirty dishes in the sink, work out the protocol in bed, and – in one standout episode – try to be “friends with the couple” (with hilariously awful results).

The Mr. and Mrs. Smith The film may have an obvious parallel here, but there may be a different anchor Americans. (Fans of that show may recognize the all-too-familiar crunching noise in the opening scene of John and Jane disposing of a corpse.) AmericansThe key questions were: If you go through the motions of being married on a daily basis, are you really married in any fundamental sense?

As for John and Jane's interpersonal conflicts, it certainly seems that way, as the pair quickly go from hilarious bickering to soul-crushing. Wedding event– shouting style is appropriate.

“Swearing makes me uncomfortable,” Jane says at one point. But while John and Jane, like many of their generation, find it hard to imagine them working the same job or in the same relationship for decades, a quick glance shows they won't have much of a choice.

In their roles as Mr. and Mrs. Smith, they inadvertently made a real-life commitment to the company and to each other. How long those lives can last is another matter, of course, and that's what makes the series dark, slippery, unpredictable fun.

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Alison Gillmore
Writer

Alison Gillmore, who attended the University of Winnipeg and then York University in Toronto, planned to become an art historian. He caught the journalism bug in 1992 when he started working as a fine arts columnist for the Winnipeg Free Press.

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