TWO evenings or so every month, the director Shawn Levy & his wife arrange a sitter for their five daughters & 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” & 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 they were talking that they were checking off boxes — which gift they had to buy for some kid’s birthday, what designs they had to get done, what happened with our daughter at school that day.”
They had realized that their escape from every day process had become another five 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 & Tina Fey go on their every week dinner date & find themselves thrown in to a night of intrigue: there’s breaking & entering, a automobile chase, a shootout & a showdown with an underworld boss at a strip club. Husband & wife come out of the adventure with some scratches & also with their ardor renewed.
“It’s a bit of shock therapy for their marriage,” Mr. Carell said. “They’re content & sort of placid, & they require to stir things up.”
That sense of contentment, Mr. Carell & Ms. Fey stressed in interviews, was crucial when they decided to take the roles. “It was important that they wouldn’t be dreadful to each other,” Ms. Fey said. “The comedy wasn’t that they detested each other. They’re in love.” Simultaneously, they 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 & woman liven up the extended sigh that is their marriage with a joint stint as sleuths, crime-busters & action heroes. Recent examples include “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” from 2005, “The Incredibles” from 2004 & “True Lies” from 1994, all films in which middle-class suburbanites suffer a crisis of comfort — their domestic contentment breeding an anxious inertia — & in which no amount of couples counselling can equal the restorative effects of, say, teaming up to thwart a terrorist, as Arnold Schwarzenegger & 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” & its kin are the action-comedies of remarriage.
Simon Kinberg, who wrote “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” (& 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,” they 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. & Mrs. Smith,” Brad Pitt & Angelina Jolie play world-class assassins whose flagging marriage is reborn after they face off against — & then battle alongside — each other. “When they were shooting, even if they were only flipping a automobile over,” Mr. Kinberg said, “we’d ask, ‘What does this say about their marriage at this moment?’ ”
“What’s the matter?” her husband asks her.
The grandparents, so to speak, of this cinematic tradition are Nick & Nora Charles, the caper-solving, martini-swilling main characters of the 1934 film “The Narrow Man” & its seven sequels. Their marriage isn’t on the brink, exactly, but five 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 & Nora have been tracking, Nora is disappointed.
Murray Pomerance, the editor of the 2008 essay collection “A Relatives Affair: Cinema Calls Home,” said in a phone interview that in Hollywood movies, the relatives — 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.”
“The mystery’s gone,” they says, with more on her mind, it seems, than the whodunit at hand.
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 in to this tradition), it’s only after Mr. Stewart’s Jeff & Grace Kelly’s Lisa have inquired in to a murder together that his doubts about settling down start to subside. The crime they solve — a husband has killed his wife — can be read partly as Jeff’s subconscious wrestling with his anxieties.
Films like “Date Night” & “True Lies,” Mr. Pomerance added, uphold this convention even as they give it their own twists. “At the finish of ‘True Lies’ they can’t return to the way things were, but they can’t damage the relatives either, so they turn the relatives in to an adjunct of the spy business.” Mr. Pomerance pointed to Alfred Hitchcock’s “Man Who Knew Much” (1956), in which Jimmy Stewart & Doris Day — who has given up her singing career for life as a suburban Los angeles housewife — prevent an assassination while searching for their kidnapped son. It’s no accident, Mr. Pomerance said, that the film ends with the reunited relatives standing “arranged in a perfect triangle” in a door.
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