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Mr. and Mrs. Smith Is a Straight Shot of Movie Star Charisma


When Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt met on the set of the 2005 film, it was a meeting of two very different emblems of Hollywood past.

Part of the problem is that the market for movies and the way films are made in Hollywood has changed dramatically in the past decade or so; audiences return to the theater for characters spanning bloated franchises rather than stars, or at least that’s how studios approach the work in an age when IP rules all. They effortlessly elevated a midrange action film — about Jane (Jolie) and John Smith (Pitt), a milquetoast suburban couple in a fraying marriage, both hiding from each other a secret: they are high-class assassins — transforming what could have been a forgettable trifle into a warm delight worthy of study. In many ways, Jolie and Pitt feel like descendants of the fury and attention Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton garnered when they flounced from their respective marriages and fell into each other’s arms on the set of the 1963 extravagant epic Cleopatra.

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