I watched La La Land recently, that film you may remember from 2016. Yeah. Yeah, no, yeah. Yeah it was good. Two thoughts: first, I think the preferable way to watch films that everyone seems determined to have a loud opinion about is to do so eight years after the fact, meaning I will be watching Barbie some time around 2031.
And second: wow, what phenomenal chemistry Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling have in that movie. It helps that they are both such talented actors – Gosling is the planet’s greatest line-reader, I’m sure of it, and Emma Stone is yet to choose a bad project (unless Poor Things sucks, I won’t know until the year 2032, sadly) – but the way they fizz and crackle off each other, first in Crazy, Stupid, Love and then in this, is unlike any other on-screen partnership of recent years. It’s not just magnetic attractiveness but that playful back-and-forth, the easy charm, and the way you can believe they’d explode together in an epic argument just as much as live together for ever in love (see the Nick–Jess dynamic that sustained seven series of New Girl).
Chemistry is a rare resource, and one we need more of. I’m convinced that, to mine more of it, Hollywood needs to take a fallow month every January and just test every actor they have on hand – line them all up and make them flirt – then greenlight any pairing that grabs. Netflix and all the other big studios, as ever, refuse to respond to my many emails about this.
To Mr & Mrs Smith, then, the Prime Video miniseries reboot (from 2 February) of Mr & Mrs Smith, a 2005 movie in which the lead pairing (Angelina Jolie/Brad Pitt) had arguably a bit too much chemistry. There is no need for this series to exist – co-creator and showrunner Francesca Sloane admitted as much in an open letter this month, saying after the project was announced in 2021: “We saw the comment ‘Who needs this show?’ We didn’t blame them. In a culture heavily inundated with remakes, this was a reasonable reaction” – but Donald Glover is both in it and co-created it (always a good sign), Hiro Murai produced and directed a few episodes, and the lead pair’s chemistry is so good and interesting that it makes what could have been a simple “They’re spies … but one of them didn’t do the washing up” format far cleverer and more textured than it has any right to be.
That pairing then is Glover (who, you will recognise from “everything”) and PEN15’s Maya Erskine. The Jolie role was originally meant to be Phoebe Waller-Bridge – both she and Glover have made some of the best TV of the last decade, and both signed mega-contracts at Prime Video as a result, and I would have loved to watch them spar with each other, too – but TV production, blah blah blah, and now Erskine gets the gig. Together, they’re excellent. The first episode sees the two spies, assigned to a New York brownstone and given a simple follow-and-intercept mission, feel each other out as they chase an assailant around various bustling city locations.
It’s fun without being spoonfeed, the dialogue is interesting without being corny, and some satisfying spy stuff happens. It’s shot from fun angles, Glover puzzles his forehead a lot like all his best work, and some superstar cameos (John Turturro, Sharon Horgan, and Paul Dano ) keep you glamorised while the slowly unfolding intrigue of the main storyline settles round you. There’s something going on – some bluff or double-cross in the works, I’m sure of it – but I’m so up-front charmed by what’s going on in the brownstone that I keep forgetting.
Sometimes spy stuff can be a bit exhausting – yeah mate, you’re talking into your wrist while sprinting full pelt through Euston station, I think I may have rumbled your cover there – especially when every bullet hits first time, every jump out of a window ends in an elegant landing, every hack is successful in the nick of time and every outlandish think-fast wheeze works out for the best. The Smiths, refreshingly, keep mucking up, and the show is better for it. There are set pieces I’ve never seen before, and the car chases always seem as if they might actually end in a crash, and the scenes between the pair are given enough space to breathe so they can bicker and flirt without having to say: “Go. Now!” And chase someone up some stairs. It’s an ancient formula – “what if two actors were really good together on screen?” But it’s astonishing how little it gets used. Hopefully the studios ignoring my emails will simply watch this and take note.
