Married? A Bit Bored? See a Shootout

Suzanne Tenner/20th Century Fox

Tina Fey and Steve Carell in “Date Night” inherit a tradition of couples’ getting marital shock treatment.

By JONAH WEINER

TWO evenings or so every month, the director Shawn Levy and his wife arrange a sitter for their three daughters and drive to Giorgio Baldi, an Italian restaurant in Santa Monica, Calif. “It’s our date night,” Mr. Levy, whose films include “Cheaper by the Dozen” and the “Night at the Museum” series, said by phone recently. The couple, who have been married for 14 years, always order the same thing: ravioli, sole, langoustines. Out at dinner a few years ago, Mr. Levy recalled, “it occurred to us as we were talking that we were just checking off boxes — which gift we had to buy for some kid’s birthday, what plans we had to get done, what happened with our daughter at school that day.”

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Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt in “Mr. and Mrs. Smith.”

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Arnold Schwarzenegger, at left, and Jamie Lee Curtis (with Art Malik at center) in “True Lies.”

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Myrna Loy and William Powell in the Nick-and-Nora adventure “The Thin Man” (1934).

They had realized that their escape from daily routine had become just another one of its offshoots, their “us” time colonized by “them” time. But there was an upside: By the time the check arrived, Mr. Levy had come up with the idea for his next movie. In “Date Night,” which opens Friday, a bored suburban couple played by Steve Carell andTina Fey go on their weekly dinner date and find themselves thrown into a night of intrigue: there’s breaking and entering, a car chase, a shootout and a showdown with an underworld boss at a strip club. Husband and wife come out of the adventure with some scratches and also with their ardor renewed.

“It’s a bit of shock therapy for their marriage,” Mr. Carell said. “They’re content and sort of placid, and they need to stir things up.”

That sense of contentment, Mr. Carell and Ms. Fey stressed in interviews, was crucial when they decided to take the roles. “It was important that we wouldn’t be awful to each other,” Ms. Fey said. “The comedy wasn’t that they hated each other. They’re in love.” At the same time, she added, “you do sometimes wonder, ‘Do I have it in me to do anything exciting again?’ ”

“Date Night” is the latest in a long line of films in which a man and woman liven up the extended sigh that is their marriage with a joint stint as sleuths, crime-busters and action heroes. Recent examples include “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” from 2005, “The Incredibles” from 2004 and “True Lies” from 1994, all films in which middle-class suburbanites suffer a crisis of comfort — their domestic contentment breeding an anxious inertia — and in which no amount of couples counseling can equal the restorative effects of, say, teaming up to thwart a terrorist, as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis do in “True Lies.” In his 1981 book “Pursuits of Happiness,” Stanley Cavell wrote about “comedies of remarriage,” movies in which marital commitment is threatened but ultimately reaffirmed. “Date Night” and its kin are the action-comedies of remarriage.

Simon Kinberg, who wrote “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” (and did uncredited work on the “Date Night” screenplay), says the basic appeal of such films is two-pronged. “Part of it is that you can imagine that you’re married to a superhero,” he said (shades of Walter Mitty). “And part of it is that these movies work through issues that face any marriage but in an incredibly cathartic context.” In “Mr. and Mrs. Smith,”Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie play world-class assassins whose flagging marriage is reborn after they face off against — and then battle alongside — each other. “When we were shooting, even if we were only flipping a car over,” Mr. Kinberg said, “we’d ask, ‘What does this say about their marriage at this moment?’ ”

The grandparents, so to speak, of this cinematic tradition are Nick and Nora Charles, the caper-solving, martini-swilling main characters of the 1934 film “The Thin Man” and its five sequels. Their marriage isn’t on the brink, exactly, but one often gets the impression that a profound boredom drives their sleuthing. In the first film, when the police have arrested a suspect in a murder case that Nick and Nora have been tracking, Nora is disappointed.

“What’s the matter?” her husband asks her.

“The mystery’s gone,” she says, with more on her mind, it seems, than the whodunit at hand.

Murray Pomerance, the editor of the 2008 essay collection “A Family Affair: Cinema Calls Home,” said in a telephone interview that in Hollywood movies, the family — an actual clan, a sports team, an army platoon or so on — typically functions as “a conservative, traditional grid structure that tends to hold a center together. It’s the thing people protect; it’s the thing people run away from but ultimately come back to.”

Films like “Date Night” and “True Lies,” Mr. Pomerance added, uphold this convention even as they give it their own twists. “At the end of ‘True Lies’ they can’t go back to the way things were, but they can’t destroy the family either, so they turn the family into an adjunct of the spy business.” Mr. Pomerance pointed to Alfred Hitchcock’s “Man Who Knew Too Much” (1956), in which Jimmy Stewart and Doris Day — who has given up her singing career for life as a suburban Indiana housewife — prevent an assassination while searching for their kidnapped son. It’s no accident, Mr. Pomerance said, that the film ends with the reunited family standing “arranged in a perfect triangle” in a door.

Despite their ostensibly tidy resolutions, such films can raise dark questions about coupledom. In Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” (which concerns an unmarried couple but fits into this tradition), it’s only after Mr. Stewart’s Jeff and Grace Kelly’s Lisa have investigated a murder together that his doubts about settling down begin to subside. The crime they solve — a husband has killed his wife — can be read partly as Jeff’s subconscious wrestling with his anxieties.

Similarly, “True Lies” is streaked with themes of mad jealousy and sexual manipulation, as in the sequence when Mr. Schwarzenegger’s Harry has his wife kidnapped, interrogates her harshly and then tricks her into a striptease.

In “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” (its title pays homage to Hitchcock via his 1941 comedy of the same name), the couple lays waste to their perfect house with a small armory of weapons. Later on, at a home-renovation superstore, chunks of exploded model kitchen rain down around them in slow motion. Mr. Kinberg said that he had the final moments of Luis Buñuel’s “Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” (1972) and Michelangelo Antonioni’s“Zabriskie Point” (1970) in mind when he envisioned those scenes in this otherwise mainstream Hollywood blockbuster. “Those movies are very anti-materialist, anti-bourgeois, anti-suburban, and we wanted the movie to embrace some of that.”

For its part, “Date Night” is an overridingly upbeat film — “a love letter to marriage,” as its screenwriter, Josh Klausner, put it. The movie’s big theme is teamwork, and its centerpiece is a squealing car chase in which Mr. Carell’s Phil drives a taxicab attached grille to grille with a sports car driven by Ms. Fey’s Claire.

“There are times when she’s pushing and he’s pulling, times when he has to let her drive and then it switches back,” Mr. Levy said. “At first I thought it was just a cool way of doing a chase. But it’s a pretty great metaphor for marriage, too, isn’t it?”

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