..Gary
Dretzka
..Noah
Forrest
..Leonard
Klady
..R.J.
Matson
..David
Poland
..Douglas
Pratt
..Ray
Pride
..Michael
Wilmington
Problems in every marriage ...
Mr. and Mrs. Smith
The advertisements for Mr. & Mrs. Smith, with fun couple Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, give away the film's basic premise-they each secretly work for a separate assassination bureau (that was how they met, in a hotel while on assignments), not realizing that the other does, too, and are ordered to take each other out-but hide a major and much happier plot twist that occurs around the movie's midpoint. The 2005 film is messy, with an obtuse beginning and no ending whatsoever, but the twist is spirited enough, and accompanied by enough pyrotechnics, to forge sufficient entertainment, preventing the film from being a complete waste of time. Of course, the movie wants desperately to be a metaphor about marriage and relationships, and it overplays that hand, but the zingy dialog is full of quips that couples will identify with, and the stars are accomplished enough performers to hold up their end no matter how dumb the movie becomes. Either you like them or you don't, and your opinion of the film will conform to that measure.
Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment has released Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2231371, $30) in letterboxed format only, with an aspect ratio of about 2.35:1 and an accommodation for enhanced 16:9 playback. The color transfer is bland, with vaguely pinkish fleshtones. The 5.1-channel Dolby Digital track, and the similarly charged DTS track, has a few distinctive rear channel effects and a basic revved up delivery, although there is not much elegance to it. The 120-minute program comes with alternate French and Spanish audio tracks in standard stereo, optional English and Spanish subtitles, 9 minutes of entertaining deleted and expanded scenes, an 8-minute piece about shooting one sequence, and two trailers.
There are also three commentary tracks, which tell you just about everything you need to know concerning how the movie was made, but nothing about what you really want to hear-the gossip surrounding the burgeoning friendship between Pitt and Jolie.
Anyway, the first track features the director, Doug Liman, and the screenwriter, Simon Kinberg. As with the other speakers, they are understandably oblivious to the movie's shortcomings ("This is a movie that, by all rights, should basically be awful, you know, given that most big studio films are awful, and not because people don't try really hard, but really with the kinds of pressures that are put on a movie like this, and all the sort of fingers that are in the pie, for that film to ultimately feel like it has a singular voice, it has integrity, is almost impossible."), but they do talk about why they had such a hard time pinning down certain narrative transitions and how financial circumstances obligated them to alter other sequences (they had to change one location from a mountain to a less expensive desert).
Producers Akiva Goldsman and Lucas Foster go into even more details about the script problems that appeared and why they had to redo some scenes even as they were canceling others. "When we shot the movie, we shot a lot of tonal variation. And ultimately, in order to find the right pitch, which is best described by the tone of the movie, which is a kind of lilting version of melodrama, we had to then cut the movie with those takes, and on occasion, we discovered we didn't have that tone. We had a dramatic tone and we were looking for something lighter, more surprising." In a way, they kind of talk around the fact that Liman didn't have a clear vision of what he wanted, keeping everything in the first person plural, "We went and reshot that to get a better performance from Brad. He was great in the first one, but he played it very dark. We'd given him the wrong direction."
On the third track, editor Michael Tronic and production designer Jeff Mann speak together, with inserted comments from effects supervisor Kevin Elam. They provide a fresh perspective on their contributions to the production and on their own crafts. "As an editor, I really don't like going out to the set that much because I really don't want to know the history of what goes behind each shot, because it might prejudice me one way or the other if I know, 'God, they worked so hard to get that, but you know what, it just doesn't work,' so I'm much less prejudiced against using things if I don't know the history behind it. I did come to the set one day and the script supervisor walked me through, just kind of showed me what the choreography was. I'm always trying to avoid showing a scene to a director and having it crash and burn because I really messed up in terms of geography, so sometimes I will get things, like a little floor plan, drawn out for me so I know that from point A to point B to point C, this is how it progresses." Tronic acknowledges that he had substantial arguments with Liman, above and beyond his normal working relationships, but he never really goes into the juicy details.
January 12, 2006
DVD Roundup: This Week's DVD Releases
The Review VaultDouglas Pratt's DVD-Laser Disc Newsletter is published monthly.
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