The Low-Key Pleasures of 'Mr. and Mrs. Smith'

The 2005 blockbuster Mr. and Mrs. Smith doesn’t just feel like it’s a document from another time; it feels almost imaginary. It’s a movie that seems like it happened, sure, but if you told me right now that, in fact, there never was a movie starring Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie as rival spies, that the filming of that movie was not the catalyst for the breakup of Pitt and then-wife Jennifer Aniston, and that all the slickly produced fight scenes and wry couples therapy two-shots I thought I remembered seeing back then were all just an elaborate Mandela effect providing a convenient origin story for Brangelina, I would certainly consider it a possibility. It’s a time capsule too tidy to be real.