Soderbergh is Back in his (Black) Bag

We all know how awkward it is when a couple at a dinner party starts fighting after a few too many drinks. But few of us have seen such spats end with a hand pinned to the dinner table with a steak knife, and there probably wasn’t a liberal dose of a powerful disinhibiting drug in the chana masala. And no, this isn’t the most explosive scene that occurs at this dinner table.

Black Bag, Steven Soderbergh’s 36th feature, sees the director return to the thrills and sex appeal of his ‘90s output. Anchored by performances from Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett as George Woodhouse and Kathryn St. Jean—two top intelligence agents whose rock-solid marriage is as infamous in British espionage circles as Kim Philby —the film is as much about what makes a healthy relationship as it is any geopolitical intrigue. It’s more than a two-hander, though. The ensemble of players in the mystery is filled out by Marisa Abela, Tom Burke, Naomie Harris, Regé-Jean Page, and Pierce Brosnan.

It's Soderbergh’s third film in as many years penned by David Koepp—following Kimi and Presence—and their collaboration appears to be hitting its stride. Black Bag bears many of the hallmarks of Soderbergh’s late output. His obsession with wide-angle photography shows no sign of slowing down, for instance. But for the first time in a while, he’s flexing the muscles he previously toned to perfection in the first half of his career with films like Out of Sight and The Limey. It also features a typically tight edit and sound mix, anchored by an excellent score from David Homes which harkens back to the work of Lalo Schiffrin (with some trip hop–tinged twists).

The setup is as simple as a dead drop. A highly compromising piece of software has been leaked from within the agency, and it’s Woodhouse’s job to track down who’s responsible. Fassbender plays George with an icy intensity. His speciality is, somewhat ironically for an intelligence agent, that he “doesn’t like liars.” (The film even goes so far as to imply he had a hand in his own father’s suicide by revealing his infidelities.) The only thing he’s more dedicated to than his work is Blanchett’s Kathryn—he cooks, cleans, procures designer evening wear, and openly declares he would kill for her. So when she's among the potential sources of the leak, the audience immediately begins reading into his blank, calculating visage all the anguish we know this betrayal, and his duty to expose it, could cause him. Kuleshov would have approved.

But the cleverness at the heart of Black Bag is in its subversion of duplicity. What initially appears as a conventional (though still thoroughly entertaining) parallelism between the deceit essential to both espionage and marriage is revealed to be a demonstration of trust being the cornerstone of any healthy relationship. Blanchett doesn’t get as much screen time as her top billing might lead you to expect, but she squeezes as much as she can out of every second of it. She plays Kathryn as wryer than George, but just as inscrutable. At the outset, this heightens the tension of what the audience assumes is a cat-and-mouse chase between them as George assesses her involvement. But as the film unfolds, it becomes clear that both of their apparent obfuscations are, in fact, manifestations of a profound faith in their commitment to each other.

Having languished in the streaming content mines for far too long—an effort he’s no doubt suited to given his penchant for coming in on-schedule and under-budget—it’s revelatory to see Soderbergh’s mastery of classical filmmaking techniques on the big screen again. There are the showy flashes—the opening shot is a lens flare–laden long take clearly nodding to Goodfellas, and there’s no shortage of slick rack focuses and split diopter shots—but the real pleasure is seeing a director use the placement of the camera and the actors within the frame to enhance the storytelling.

A useful example is a psych appointment between Blanchett and Harris. What initially appears to be textbook shot–reverse shot has much more going on beneath the surface. The view of London from the office’s windows begins almost totally blown out. But as the conversation develops, the exterior becomes clearer, reflecting the shift in both characters' perspective as the scope of their talk expands from a simple check-in into something with greater implications. And after each verbal volley in the repartee between them, the camera gets closer and more level to the actor’s faces, indicating their seeing one another with greater clarity.

The film's biggest flaws are all downstream of its MacGuffin, a nuclear meltdown-inducing piece of malware known as Severus. The idea is that the fallout—political and otherwise—from the deadly nuclear incident it would precipitate would be a sure-fire trigger of regime change. Brosnan’s Steiglitz repeatedly calls it “a damn good idea” and Page’s character shouts “it would have ended the fucking the war!” This strains credulity on multiple fronts: One, I don’t have a security clearance, but I seriously doubt a power station meltdown would cause any such stir, and two, it’s laughable that any European intelligence service wouldn’t gleefully smash a button to end the war in Ukraine overnight without a second thought, 20,000 casualties or not. It’s forgivable—thrillers need MacGuffins after all—but because it tries to raise the stakes by tying them to a brutal, ongoing conflict, it ends up having the opposite of the intended heightening effect. A good idea it is not.

But hardly any plot issues could disqualify a film so lively and replete with fresh twists on familiar material. The climactic confrontation, which sees the players return to the dinner table that set the plot in motion, feels more like something out of a Thin Man movie than a Le Carré novel, but it works perfectly. And while Fassbender and Blanchett are the film’s backbone, the ensemble do their fair share of heavy lifting. Burke (possibly the best cad working today) and Abela as a fiery, streetwise young analyst are the clear standouts, but there’s plenty of fun in seeing Brosnan and Harris play with their Bond personae too. Ultimately though, the joy of Black Bag is watching a director revel in the kind of story with which he launched a career with all the hard-won mastery of technique which only comes four decades into one.