NATHAN WEINBENDER:
Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag is sleek, slick and swift, a 90-minute espionage thriller that’s as slinky and martini-dry as the married couple at its center. Their names are George Woodhouse and Kathryn St. John, and they’re agents working for the same British intelligence organization. He’s fastidious and coldly observant, a human polygraph machine. She’s brittle, austere, always in on a joke that only she knows.
George and Kathryn could perhaps only be played by Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett, who here occupy a world of immaculate, barely furnished flats and perfectly tailored suits. As the film opens, George gets intel from a superior that there are rats within the agency, and one of them may well be Kathryn.
The story is standard cloak-and-dagger stuff, with satellite feeds, off-shore bank accounts, covert meetings on benches, corruption that may go all the way to the top, and a MacGuffin in the form of a nuclear weapon. In fact, as you think back on the plot, the whole thing may be one big MacGuffin: You try to follow the back-and-forth, the double crosses and the false identities, and you eventually give into the rhythms and the style of it and trust that it will all come together in the end.
What’s most compelling about Black Bag, which is one of the most purely entertaining Soderbergh has made in awhile, are the gestures between the players. There’s a generational divide between George and Kathryn and their fellow operatives, seen at a dinner party where George has slipped truth serum into the stew. The younger agents are couples—hot-headed Freddie (Tom Burke) and surveillance expert Clarissa (Marisa Abela), and the calculated James (Regé-Jean Page) and agency psychoanalyst Zoe (Naomie Harris—and they unwittingly reveal that they’ll happily put their jobs ahead of their relationships.
We come to realize that George and Kathryn aren’t like that. Kathryn, in fact, calls their marriage a “professional weakness,” which is why George finds it so impossible to believe that she’s a traitor. The term “black bag” is like George and Kathryn’s reverse safe word, wielded when one of them is prying into confidential information, but that confidentiality only goes so far.
Soderbergh is a famously restless director, and this is already his second film of the year following January’s flee-floating ghost story Presence. He photographs Black Bag in natural light: The domestic scenes have a menacing orange glow and the scenes at work have a fluorescent coldness, with windows and glass panels that seem to swallow up the characters. He also shoots scenes from alternating angles and he cuts back and forth—visually underlines the idea that everyone is talking out of both sides of their mouth.
The surface of Black Bag resembles one of Soderbergh’s jazzy, light-on-their-feet heist thrillers like Ocean’s 11 or Out of Sight, but its themes are the closest he’s come to those of his debut Sex, Lies and Videotape. Every conversation feels like an interrogation, with George gleaning personal details about his fellow spies and then pitting them against one another, and it’s a movie about the lines we draw between work life and domestic life, and how they blur—whether we like it or not.
For Spokane Public Radio, I'm Nathan Weinbender.
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Nathan Weinbender is a co-host of Spokane Public Radio’s Movies 101, heard Friday evenings at 6:30 PM on KPBX and Saturday afternoons at 1:30 PM on KSFC.