Brad Pitt wears an IWC Pilot's Watches

Doug Liman, who a few years earlier had put a plain TAG Heuer Link on Matt Damon's amnesiac killer in The Bourne Identity, does something quietly similar in Mr. & Mrs. Smith. Brad Pitt's John Smith is a contract assassin, but the watch on his wrist is the watch of a man you would trust to assemble a patio table: an IWC Pilot's Chronograph, reference IW3706, a 39mm steel case on a steel bracelet, black dial, white Arabic numerals, a day-and-date window at three, three black subdials. There is no flash to it, which is the point.

That restraint is the whole joke of the marriage. John and Jane Smith each kill people for a living and neither has told the other; the film runs on domestic camouflage, on the idea that a person can be a total stranger to the spouse across the breakfast table. The IWC plays its part, reading as the nice watch a successful, slightly boring husband would own rather than as spy hardware. The 3706 was IWC's workhorse Fliegerchronograph from the late 1990s into the mid-2000s, built on the Valjoux 7750 inside an IWC-finished caliber, its lineage running back to the wartime Mark XI navigator watch with the same soft-iron antimagnetic case and the same insistence on a dial you can read at a glance. There is a small pleasure in it: a three-thousand-dollar instrument built around precision, worn by a man so imprecise about his own life that his wife has no idea what he does for a living.