About a year ago, I remember casually checking the IMDB page for Hancock to read up on it, since a lot of details were unknown at the time. I noticed that the first 'plot keyword' they had up for the film was 'interracial relationship,' which squared with what was common knowledge at the time -- that the movie was about superhero Hancock falling for the wife of PR man Bateman, played by Threon, and so forth. At the time I remember thinking 'That's rather pioneering of Sony, to put out a major summer tentpole with a black man/white woman romantic relationship at the center.' So many previous high-profile movies with a white female/black male central romantic relationship have been explicitly *about* that, i.e. Jungle Fever. It's rarely been able to go unaddressed, as you'd expect it to be in a superhero movie.
Spoilers follow. Obviously Hancock turns out to be much weirder than that, with the Theron-Smith relationship literally being knocked off its trajectory at the last possible second before a black male A-lister and white female A-lister are about to kiss in front of all of America. (Should Sony be quizzed over why they didn't allow that kiss to happen? Notice later that Hancock says it did, but we don't see it.) But that's hardly the end of the film's interracial relationship thread, at least as I see it. I've consulted Denby and a few other reviewers and they don't seem to address the third-act dynamic between Theron and Smith, and how the story *seems* to reveal itself as being about an aggrieved interracial couple fighting for their relationship throughout history.
In the third act hospital-bed finale, Theron and Smith have a very emotional ten pages or so of dialogue in which Theron cries and talks about how every time they've tried to be together and have a normal life, society has intervened to keep them apart. There's mention made of Hancock being beaten by a mob in the 1930s -- presumably because of them being together in public, not because he was performing superheroics and scaring people. I don't know how that squares with whatever happened to them in "4 B.C.", and it doesn't make the movie any less clunky, but that entire passage struck me as being explicitly tailored to pluck the heartstrings of audience members in an interracial relationship who are tired of people glancing over their shoulders as they pass by.
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