Multiple dinner parties take place in Black Bag, and you, perceptive viewer and honored guest, are expected to bring a number of things to the soiree. Don’t worry about the wine or the hors d’oeuvres; your host, director Steven Soderbergh, has all manner of luxury covered. Your job is to arm yourself with more sensory gifts: a sharp set of eyes, the better to peer through the low digital lighting; an engaged and discerning mind, crucial to navigating David Koepp’s labyrinthine script; and a healthy appreciation of classical glamour, incarnated here by Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender.
That last ask is hardly a tall order. Blanchett and Fassbender are capable of getting dirty—she melted down memorably in Tár, he went feral in 12 Years a Slave—but they’re best associated as ambassadors of crisp, patrician elegance. Here they play Kathryn St. Jean and George Woodhouse, and if those names don’t tip you off as to their nationalities, their accents and wardrobe surely will. One of the first times we see George, he’s prepping a roast, decked out in a striped apron, his features accentuated by a neat haircut and severe black spectacles; after a dollop of sauce stains his shirt cuff, he insists on changing before the company arrives. Quite a few crimes are committed in Black Bag—theft, murder, unauthorized government surveillance, bleeding on a new rug—but the one offense that unifies the characters is that of aggravated Britishness.
Soderbergh, of course, is American, though his sleek professionalism and no-nonsense style prove a snug fit for the world of Black Bag—a movie about loyalty, duplicity, and six gorgeous people who always seem to be on the verge of fucking or killing each other. In the opening scene, the camera smoothly follows George in and out of a nightclub (per usual, Soderbergh has served as his own cinematographer, under the pseudonym Peter Andrews), capturing his purposeful stride as he ignores the dancers and the music. He’s there to meet his boss, Meacham (Gustaf Skarsgård), a well-dressed chap who informs George that their intelligence agency has suffered a critical leak, and he’s narrowed the list of suspects to five operatives—including Kathryn. So George does what any self-respecting spy and inveterate inquisitor would do: He invites them all over for dinner.
George’s stealthy investigative technique mirrors Soderbergh’s own act of filmmaking deception. In genre terms, Black Bag postures itself as a big, brawny thriller; its plot traffics in treason, geopolitical intrigue, and incipient violence. (As the head of our unnamed spook-shop, a fine Pierce Brosnan provides additional gravitas.) Empirically, however, the movie’s pleasures are far more intimate and chic. It is, by and large, a dialogue picture, concocting a series of freighted conversations in which lies are told and exposed, and in which forceful personalities collaborate and collide.
Beyond George and Kathryn, the singers performing in this medley of verbiage include two faintly antagonistic couples. Clarissa, a sharp-eyed and beautiful analyst played by Marisa Abela (consider this your reminder to watch Industry), is sleeping with the much older Freddie (Tom Burke, trapped under a dirty-blond beard), a Falstaff-like figure who’s less foolish than he lets on. Opposite the table is Stokes (Regé-Jean Page, finally receiving a big-screen role that properly leverages his dashing charisma), a cool customer who exudes competence and sex appeal; he’s dating Zoe (Naomie Harris), whose role as the agency’s in-house psychiatrist makes her privy to all manner of corrupt thoughts and disreputable behavior.
“That’s the first interesting thing you’ve said all day,” Zoe says to Kathryn during one of their mandated therapy sessions. And Black Bag is the second interesting movie Soderbergh has made this year. The first, released just seven weeks ago, was Presence, an experimental ghost story that was more notable for its technical bona fides than its plot or its characters. His follow-up isn’t exactly a rich text, but it’s more dynamic and entertaining; it operates with similar concision (running 94 fleet minutes), but it feels less like a self-imposed challenge than a fully formed work, humming with energy, playfulness, and wit.
“Shut the fuck up when you talk to people,” Clarissa snaps at Freddie during that opening meal, in a line that encapsulates the sparky snap of Koepp’s screenplay. The best scenes in Black Bag involve the characters hurling words like blades, attacking their fencing partners with a combination of cold calculation and hot-blooded fury. Soderbergh stages these exchanges with an appropriate lack of fuss, allowing the actors’ spiky line readings and his own precise editing to carry the load. A sequence in which George subjects all of his associates to interlocking polygraph examinations may just be a simple series of (embarrassing personal) questions and answers, but it nonetheless pulses with vitality and suspense.
Speaking of lie detection, at one point Clarissa laments that the deceitful nature of her profession renders the pursuit of actual truth impossible, because when everyone fibs so effortlessly and constantly, you can never be sure of what’s real. Similar logic might apply to Black Bag (the title refers to espionage lexicon for secreting classified material), which infuses every scene with the potential for dishonesty, forcing us to continuously question characters’ assertions and motivations. The climax deigns to supply us with one of those everything-is-explained monologues (complete with pointed revelatory flashbacks), but the task of parsing all of the intersecting agendas can feel exhausting. The result is a jigsaw-puzzle movie whose final, cohesive image is less satisfying than its individual pieces.
Which, to be fair, are quite appealing. Aside from some annoyingly dim lighting, Soderbergh’s minimalist approach pays major dividends, especially when working in concert with Fassbender, who’s able to convey intelligence and superiority with his searching eyes as well as his clipped dialect. (As enjoyable as the actor was playing a CIA rogue on The Agency, he’s even more electric when he can use his real accent.) Shots of George invisibly processing information—seeing a ticket stub in his trash, scanning footage from a spy satellite, gauging the veracity of Kathryn’s laughter at a movie screening—lend the film a strangely cerebral kick.
Fassbender is the true star of Black Bag, but it makes sense that he and Blanchett receive equal billing. That’s because, for all of the movie’s narrative trickery, its greatest surprise is thematic: It asserts, with profound sincerity, its belief in the sanctity of marriage. Yes, Kathryn and George are dogged and talented professionals, possibly working at cross-purposes. But they are also life partners, and as the stakes sharpen and the screws tighten, the mutuality of their affection comes to the fore, creating a mood that’s both exciting and genuinely romantic.
Or, as Clarissa puts it when learning about the obsessive measures George takes to protect his spouse under the assumption she’ll do the same for him: “That’s really fucking hot.” Black Bag may be a movie full of double-crosses and falsehoods, but in moments like that, it lets the truth speak for itself.
Grade: B+
Jeremy Beck is the editor-in-chief of MovieManifesto. He watches more movies and television than he probably should.