‘Black Bag’: Stephen Soderbergh’s Wry Spies

Shady spies with bruised hearts fuel Black Bag, a slick, taut, accomplished but minor thriller that’s more interested in its mechanized puzzle-box plot than it is in any sustained emotional fallout. “When you can lie about everything,” says a romantically frustrated covert-ops agent, “How do you tell the truth about anything?” It’s a question the film has more fun raising than it does answering.

BLACK BAG ★★★ (3/5 stars)
Directed by: Steven Soderbergh
Written by: David Koepp
Starring: Cate Blanchett, Michael Fassbender, Marisa Abela, Tom Burke, Naomie Harris, Regé-Jean Page, Pierce Brosnan
Running time: 94 mins

The bait in this clever cinematic concoction is cloak-and-dagger marital strife—specifically concerning “perfect fucking couple” George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) and Kathryn St. Jean (Cate Blanchett). He’s a brilliant intelligence agent, she’s the head of the Psy-Ops division, they both work at Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre. Viewers of Showtime’s current TV show the Agency might feel a bit of déjà vu, since Fassbender also plays a brilliant intelligence agent struggling with a personal romance. 

There’s been a breach at the NCSC: someone stole a deadly piece of Stuxnut-style malware code named Severus which can trigger a nuclear facility meltdown—think Russia, not Iran—and kill thousands of innocent people. George has a week to root out the mole. Only five people have security clearance enough to know about Severus: ambitious upstart James Stokes (Regé-Jean Page), Catholic-girl staff psychologist Dr. Zoe Vaughan (Naomie Harris), louche lush Freddie Smalls (Tom Burke), and horny satellite analyst Clarissa Dubose (Marisa Abela). Oh, plus one more: his wife Kathryn. Awkward! 

Complicating the espionage arithmetic is that dashing James is secretly sleeping with guarded Zoe and philandering Freddie is going out with jealous Clarissa. So George stirs the pot by throwing a last-minute dinner party as his own sort of covert recon, lacing his homemade Chana Masala with a truth drug so he can play mind games with his colleagues and see how they react. It’s the glummest meal ever, ending with a steak knife through someone’s hand. Business as usual for the low-key paranoid paramours. 

But then Kathryn goes off on a cryptic Black Bag business trip to Zurich, James gives George sensitive intel about a mysterious bank transfer, George gets Clarissa to track Kathryn with some down-low GPS camera surveillance, and Zoe mulls blowing up both Freddie’s and James’ various love lives. Not at all happy about the hijinks: their surly boss, Arthur Stieglitz (Pierce Brosnan), who rightly glowers when he senses his employees’ rampant subterfuge. 

“There’s a plan, and a counter-plan,” says one character to another halfway through all the duplicity, which of course there is. A fellow agent dies when someone spritzes his tumbler with poison, tensions rise, and George tries his best to remain loyal to his wife—while packing a pistol in his tacklebox. “If she is in trouble, I will do everything in my power to extricate her,” he snarls to a notably aroused Clarissa. “That’s fucking hot,” she replies.

Black Bag is classic bespoke Soderbergh: elegantly crafted, impeccably tailored, cleverly calculating, with self-aware camerawork, efficient storytelling, and coolly controlled emotions, all set to a funky pulsing retro-infused David Holmes score. It’s satisfying entertainment about smart people doing smart things, professionally executed, briskly edited, and delivered with a lean running time. This Soderbergh’s spy-vs-spy sandbox, his human psych experiment in deception, one that shares DNA with his dazzling Ocean’s trilogy, albeit swapping out those movies’ big-budget candy-colored exuberance for a tighter-lipped shadowy intrigue.

But Fassbender and Cate have no chemistry. They’re so chill, they’re chilly. He’s dour and exudes a nonplussed sociopathy, she says flirty remarks with a monotone. This is a fucking perfect couple? It doesn’t help that the film’s cinematography is awash in chartreuse yellow, although that color choice does drive home the fact that all of the people in this unsexy sextet look generally miserable. Their banter is businesslike, rat-a-tat deadpan, delivered with crisp English accents. Passions may run hot, but cool control tamps down most of the tense flare-ups.

The movie is never less than wry, though, and has a few moments of self-aware levity that are hard to resist, especially when one spy’s ruse involves literally being tight-assed. “Relax your sphincter muscle” is not only a character’s droll retort—it’s good advice for the filmmakers.