'Black Bag' Review: Soderbergh's Sexy Spies Know How to Seduce an Audience
Eschewing the typical spy trappings, "Black Bag" works when it gets petty
When the 2005 film Mr. and Mrs. Smith hit theaters no one could have known it would set the tone for married spy movies for the next two decades. It’s been a hard shell to break through but, with a little ingenuity and going even further back into the past director Steven Soderbergh and screenwriter David Koepp have done just that with Black Bag. Black Bag isn’t just a story of two hot married spies, though it is, but more how monogamy and honesty can survive when two people are in the professional liar business.
Koepp’s script deftly navigates between the petty, the romantic and the suspenseful for a movie that, similar to Focus Features’ Conclave last year, seeks to hearken back to old-fashioned storytelling to make an entertaining film for adults seeking a return to popcorn films of the 2000s. All of Soderbergh’s best bits of business are on display, from the rapid-fire editing akin to Haywire, the David Holmes score reminiscent of Oceans 11, and the relationship mess of Behind the Candelabra.
George and Kathryn (Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett) are happily married intelligence agents. But when Kathryn is accused of being a double agent, George becomes both desperate to protect her and curious as to whether there’s any truth to it.
Unlike other spy movies wherein the characters are enmeshed in an overly convoluted story involving a variety of MacGuffins, Black Bag has one clear premise: is Kathryn a double agent and, by extension, openly lying to her husband? And that premise sustains a swift 94-minutes, even if it didn’t have subplots involving a MacGuffin-esque flash drive capable of destroying nuclear power plants. What Koepp and Soderbergh are more interested in are relationship dynamics when it involves truth. Do partners really want total honesty? Is it better to lie if it means sparing someone pain? As Kathryn tells George, she lies to him “only when I have to” while George abhors liars so much he surveilled and turned in his own spy father when he was a boy.
Much like Soderbergh’s 2013 thriller Side Effects — also brilliant — Black Bag finds the seduction that comes from lying. Kathryn is a liar so skillful she alters the dosages of her medications to her therapist to just the right amounts to avoid triggering concern. But, in comparison, are the couple’s friends Clarissa and Freddie (Marisa Abela and Tom Burke) whose chronic lying to each other quite literally ends with a fork to the wrist. However, as the movie goes on and George becomes committed to find out if his wife is the mole, the movie turns on a very slight axis. This isn’t a story about a man trying to find out if his wife committed crimes. It’s how he’s going to find a way to reconcile with his own conscience to get her out.
Blanchett and Fassbender play Kathryn and George as if they were Mr. and Mrs. Smith with a hint of Nick and Nora Charles if they were funneled through a Le Carre novel with a twist of Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf. It makes for a heady and delicious cocktail is what I’m saying. They’re sexy and playful when alone, brilliant in the field, and can be as petty and manipulative as can be. A dinner scene wherein George assembles all the potential mole suspects devolves into a mean-spirited game of Truth (Sans Dare) thanks to George dosing their dinner. “Darling, you must not dose our guests,” Kathryn coos.
Fassbender’s cold, monotone spy routine is starting to wear a bit thin, especially if you’re already watched The Killer or The Agency. But, in this case, he channels his inner Richard Burton to play a man who has to mask his emotions to avoid showing weakness. He compels Clarissa to hack into a satellite system and, while doing so, gives her a speech about how he will do everything in his power to extricate Kathryn from whatever she’s involved in, no matter what. It’s a powerful, simple scene of sexiness because of his total devotion that the audience agrees with Clarissa when she responds with, “That’s so hot.”
But Blanchett is no slouch either. Outside of rocking some jaw-dropping fashions (courtesy of costume goddess Ellen Mirojnick) Blanchette is able to give an equally cool mien to Fassbender, while being more overt in her emotions. She finds the humor in Koepp’s script and is able to make George more human through her earthy sensuality.
The rest of the cast is equally solid, though it is Abela who’s the scene stealer (watch this and not Back to Black if you’re seeing her for the first time). Abela is the comic relief, a presumed loose cannon who might be the best spy of them all. She drops saucy one-liners and joke with aplomb, but sells Clarissa as a master manipulator, particularly in a polygraph sequence opposite Fassbender. Though Burke, Rege-Jean Page and Naomi Harris are also well-placed they aren’t written as well individually as they are together. This is a movie that works its strongest magic as an ensemble, which is why the two dinner sequences are the film’s best moments.
And that is the magic of Black Bag. There are the usual trappings of a spy movie: covert meetings, hacking, scary Russians, and a world killing device, but they just…aren’t as important? The movie is best when the spies stop being polite and start getting real. The “black bag” that everyone references is more the pit where everyone places their secrets and while their job gives them an excuse for that the movie ultimately says, “Everyone has a black bag of their own.”
Black Bag is such slick fun. Fassbender and Blanchett are stellar and the movie’s script hearkens back to classic cinema in the best way. At 94 minutes the film never overstays its welcome and, if anything, makes you eager to see it again.
Black Bag hits theaters March 14.