If a James Bond or Mission: Impossible film excised all its action scenes––save a stray explosion or gunshot––while employing a script with a pop John le Carré sensibility, it might resemble something like Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag. A hyper-slick, suave spy thriller, it’s mainly relegated to dinner tables and office rooms as stages for rapid-fire, gleefully barbed verbal sparring scripted by David Koepp, returning to the genre after Ethan Hunt’s first outing. Primarily focusing on a trio of couples working in British intelligence, Koepp’s script poses the question: it is possible to have a healthy relationship when there’s no such thing as separating work from life, particularly when your job description is one of a professional liar?
Although the budget allows a dash of globe-trotting requisite for its genre, most of the week-long story takes place in London. We’re introduced to George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender), a top agent with OCD-level attention to cleanliness and detail not far removed from the actor’s recent Fincher outing. He’s tasked with finding the rat in his top-secret intelligence agency, the suspects now narrowed down to five colleagues: Freddie Smalls (Tom Burke), a weathered agent past his prime; Freddie’s younger girlfriend Clarissa (Marisa Abela); the agency’s resident therapist, Dr. Zoe Vaughan (Naomie Harris); and her significant other, the newly promoted Colonel James Stokes (Regé-Jean Page). The fifth is his wife, Kathryn St. Jean (Cate Blanchett), a woman he adores so much he’d kill for her.
Setting up this tangled web of suspicion and paranoia, Soderbergh and Koepp have a field day with a riveting, extended introductory dinner scene where each couple gathers at George and Kathryn’s home, full of barbed, cutting accusations in which nothing professional or personal is off the table. It’s quickly apparent Black Bag is more concerned with the mechanics of relationships than the standard, world-saving lore of the spy genre. There’s a playful, heightened quality to the dialogue––claims of infidelity, jealousy, and betrayal are doled out––yet such assertions are delivered and received with an air of nonchalance. It’s all in the name of a game where one wrong word can have deathly consequences. Capturing this with a gauzy sheen, light sources appearing from the most unexpected of places––an effect strangely cozy as it is disorienting––Peter Andrews is once again in fine form.
As in most spy thrillers worth their salt, Soderbergh is less concerned about detailing the MacGuffin (in this case, Severus, a malware that has the ability to destabilize a nuclear facility with mass casualties) and more preoccupied with George’s commitment to Kathryn while secretly attempting to track her every move. In a workplace where a committed relationship can be a professional weakness and easy target for the enemy to exploit, Black Bag evolves into a story about the lengths one will go to protect the one they love. Rather than anything so schmaltzy as that may sound, there’s an exacting, sharp precision to the caustic turns where clues of potential betrayal are uncovered, in which a misplaced movie stub means one’s entire life could shatter.
The film draws its title from the phrase an agent uses when they can’t reveal anything about a mission or their motives. Transferring this cop-out to the foundation of marriage––which, at its healthiest, means no secret should ever be concealed––makes for a compelling juxtaposition: one is on the edge of their seat, perpetually wondering if Kathryn is staying loyal to both her job and George or if she truly has ulterior, treasonous motives. While the immaculately costumed cast (including a winking Bond cameo) is clearly taking great pleasure in playing the game, there is the sense they are pawns in Soderbergh’s brisk chess match, here to entertain without a great deal of depth. Nevertheless, Black Bag moves with such a briskness it hardly matters in the moment.
A friend recently remarked how Soderbergh’s career since a very short-lived, self-imposed “retirement” has mainly been the experiment of an A-level director punching below their weight, selecting projects––many of them formal-flexing genre exercies––that are entertaining in the moment but lack a certain ambition or staying power. The insular, ouroboros arc of Black Bag won’t prove any detractors wrong per se, but seeing how Soderbergh and Koepp can expertly stack the deck to always be one step before the viewer is an exhilarating thrill to behold. Not since his Ocean’s days has the director had as much amusement at pulling the rug out from underneath his audience. If Amazon’s all-but-certain exploitation of James Bond and Tom Cruise’s potential goodbye to Mission: Impossible has one feeling bleak about the spy thriller, Black Bag is proof it’s very much alive and kicking.
Black Bag opens in theaters on Friday, March 14.