Steven Soderbergh came up as a young Turk in the late 1980s, exploding Hollywood narrative conventions and exploring new layers of metafiction in sex, lies & videotape. Now he’s lived to become an exemplar of old-school Hollywood storytelling. I don’t think he gets enough credit for that magnificent run he had between 1998 and 2002, when he made Out of Sight, The Limey, Erin Brockovich, Traffic, and Ocean’s Eleven. Those alone would cement his status as one of our great filmmakers.
Since then, his record has been considerably spottier in terms of both box-office and aesthetics, but he has still turned out brilliant thrillers in various veins, many of which didn’t find an audience (The Informant!, Side Effects, Logan Lucky, Unsane), although the Covid pandemic drove many people to his 2011 killer-virus film Contagion. He’s back in his suave Ocean’s mode with his British spy thriller Black Bag, a quick little exercise that entertains efficiently.
The movie begins with a long take through London’s streets as George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) goes to a meeting in a nightclub with an MI6 colleague (Gustaf Skarsgård) who hands him a list of five suspects in the theft of a software program from the agency that can inflict thousands of deaths on an enemy nation. On the list is George’s wife Kathryn (Cate Blanchett), but he doesn’t tell her that as they host the other four suspects Zoe, James, Freddie, and Clarissa (Naomie Harris, Regé-Jean Page, Tom Burke, and Marisa Abela) at a dinner party at their house.
The dinner guests know full well that this party will be an interrogation, but they spill lots of unpleasant stuff about one another anyway because George spikes their chana masala with a truth serum. What the serum can’t reveal, George does — when Freddie swears on his life that he’s never cheated on Clarissa, George busts him by giving everyone times, dates, and locations of his cheating. He doesn’t play favorites, though, because later he doesn’t blink as he blackmails Clarissa by threatening to give Freddie information about her infidelity. Fassbender wears black plastic-rimmed glasses that make him look like Soderbergh, and you probably shouldn’t go to a dinner party with his character.
Clarissa responds by bemoaning the inability of MI6 agents to build any relationships because of the job’s secrecy. Indeed, George and Kathryn say the words “black bag” to each other whenever they can’t answer questions about their jobs. Much of the film is George tracking his wife remotely from his London office while she bops about Zurich on a black-bag job. Zoe is the psychiatrist for the unit, and everybody is lying in their sessions with her because they know that she’ll breach doctor-patient confidentiality to report on them to her superiors. Kinda makes you wonder what’s the point of having her there. (Also, psychiatrists are always the least trustworthy people in Soderbergh’s movies.) In this environment where everybody is willing to betray everybody else, the issue of whether George and Kathryn can trust each other takes on a particular urgency.
As well as to real-world current events, Soderbergh cheekily nods to the James Bond movies by casting Bond veterans Harris and Pierce Brosnan, who portrays the blustery director of these agents’ unit. Spy-movie buffs may find this entry light on action sequences, as Soderbergh’s set pieces revolve around subtler pieces of drama such as that dinner party and George sitting all his colleagues down for polygraph tests. Still, the movie does have the slick Soderbergh touch of his popcorn entertainments, with burnished interiors on George and Kathryn’s home contrasted with the cold blue office spaces of the agency. At 93 minutes, Black Bag engages you consistently and then ends with the traitor unmasked. Maybe you can ask for more given the star power here, but I’ll take this happily and go home.
Black Bag
Starring Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett. Directed by Steven Soderbergh. Written by David Koepp.
