Originally posted March 6
How do two people who lie for a living keep their marriage intact? That’s the foundation of Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag, a tightly-wound caper that explores the limits of marital trust and plays guessing games to the very end regarding motivations and honesty in the world of espionage.
The who’s-zooming-who plot can be a difficult one when it comes to maintaining audience engagement; pull the rug out too many times, and viewers will check out until the final minute, when everything is finally explained. It’s a testament to David Koepp’s screenplay that it tosses out just enough red herrings and unspoken motivations to maintain a balance of enigma and empathy.
The spy spouses are George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) and Kathryn St. Jean (Cate Blanchett). They say they would kill for each other and defy orders to protect each other — but would they, really? (When their conversations stray into subjects that they have to keep classified, one of them will simply say “black bag” to the other.) Their marriage is put to the test when George is handed a list of five names of operatives, including Kathryn’s, who may have stolen the film’s MacGuffin, a device known as Severus.
In a sequence that’s more Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? than John le Carré, George and Kathryn invite the other four people on the list to a dinner party. (George doesn’t tell Kathryn that she occupies the fifth slot.) The guests are pair of couples: agency psychiatrist Zoe (Naomie Harris) and up-and-coming intelligence officer Stokes (Regé-Jean Page) as well as young analyst Clarissa (Marisa Abela, Back to Black) and her older boyfriend, boozy veteran spy Freddie (Tom Burke, The Souvenir).
George leaves nothing to chance, changing shirts when he gets a stray bit of sauce on his starched cuff, and loading the curry with a psychotropic drug to get his guests talking. The dinner doesn’t yield immediate results, leaving George — who’s apparently unparalleled at telling when people are lying — forced to consider Kathryn as a suspect. And the spy game is afoot.
Soderbergh and Koepp give their main sextet of characters (plus a few moments for Pierce Brosnan as the agency boss) a great deal to do and say, giving each of these talented performers room to shine. Fassbender, dressed here in eyeglasses and turtlenecks that call to mind Michael Caine’s screen spy Harry Palmer, is the king of playing capable men somewhat cut off from human emotion (it’s been his calling card from Shame through Prometheus and beyond), and he once again finds a way to balance cool precision with romantic ardor. It helps that the object of that ardor is Blanchett, luxuriating in Kathryn’s flowing tresses and chic ensembles but never losing the precision of a woman who dissembles and murders for a living.
Abela’s performance as Amy Winehouse was the only successful facet of the terrible biopic on the singer, and here she’s unrecognizable as a relative newbie to the world of cloak-and-dagger who may have more going that those around her would suspect. I haven’t had a chance to watch her on Industry yet, but from these two films alone, it’s clear that she’s both talented and chameleonic.
As usual, Soderbergh acts as his own cinematographer and editor, excelling at both; his lighting sharply contrasts the hi-tech sterility of the agency offices with the caramel-colored coziness of George and Kathryn’s posh flat — the candles on the table at that dinner party play out in various fascinating ways — and as a cutter, he knows when to let a conversation play out in real time and when to ratchet up the espionage tension. For all the satellite surveillance and double-crosses, however, Soderbergh never loses sight of the fact that this is, ultimately, a portrait of two human beings involved in a not-quite-quotidian marriage. (And it’s a consistently cool portrait, thanks to another memorably jazzy score from frequent collaborator David Holmes.)
And Black Bag is a not-quite-quotidian spy movie. The stakes are the fate of a relationship, not the fate of the world, and all the pieces come together to make human drama even more interesting than potential apocalypse.
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Screenwriters: David Koepp
Cast: Michael Fassbender, Cate Blanchett, Regé-Jean Page, Marisa Abela, Naomie Harris, Tom Burke, Pierce Brosnan
Executive producer: David Koepp
Producers: Casey Silver, Gregory Jacobs
Cinematographer: Peter Andrews
Production design: Philip Messina
Editing: Mary Ann Bernard
Music: David Holmes
Sound design: Paul Munro, production sound mixer
Production companies: Focus Features, Casey Silver Productions
In English
93 minutes
