RATING
Director(s): Steven Soderbergh
Country: United States
Author: David Koepp
Actor(s): Michael Fassbender, Gustaf Skarsgård, Cate Blanchett
Written by Tom Augustine.
With the notable exception of Erin Brockovich, the very best Steven Soderbergh films are love stories, though they don’t always announce their intentions as such from the outset. Or rather; the best Soderbergh films are about the human condition called love, interrogating its definitions, the way we perceive love, the way genre and the cinematic form can encroach on our understanding of its nature. Soderbergh’s first film, sex, lies and videotape, still a strong contender for his very best film, certainly falls into this category, as does his other bona fide masterpiece Out of Sight. Both Ocean’s Eleven and Ocean’s Twelve weave warm love stories into the fabric of their male heisting camaraderie, while the polarising Solaris channels love through the cosmos on the grandest scale possible. Soderbergh’s latest, Black Bag, comfortably his finest work in almost a decade, slots nimbly into place here. It’s a film about trust, transactional sex, and lie detection — but most specifically it is about love. In the chilly, metallic world of British espionage, nothing is certain except for one thing, and that thing is made instantly obvious to us: protagonists George and Kathryn Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett) love each other very, very much.
In my review of the beguiling, not-entirely-successful Presence earlier this year, I mentioned that Soderbergh’s recent work has felt particularly digressive, mostly technical curios or throwaway dalliances that suggested the auteur had little left to prove, but also little fire left in the belly. Black Bag serves as something of a rebuke of that sentiment — from the off it’s clear that this is the most engaged and fierce we’ve seen Soderbergh be in years. Like 2011’s excellent Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, with which this shares DNA, if not the same mournful tone, the setup here is devilishly simple. An adept, somewhat robotic senior agent for British intelligence is presented with a unique problem — there is a mole in the division, and he must root them out. In both cases, there’s only a small number of people that it can actually be, and like Tinker Tailor, the root of this betrayal can be found in human desire and fallibility. In this case, said senior agent would be Fassbender’s George, a human lie detector — the twist in this tale being that one of the five suspects is his own wife, Kathryn. The other suspects come in the form of two couples, underlings in the organisation who both admire and fear George and Kathryn, who strike an imposing, intimidating wall of secrecy and unification. There’s Colonel Stokes and Dr Vaughan (Regé-Jean Page and Naomie Harris), the golden boy on the rise and governmental psychologist assigned to monitor the other agents. Then there’s Freddie and Clarissa (Tom Burke and Marisa Abela), the agency’s resident elder statesman fuckup and a new, eager addition to the team. Where George and Kathryn’s relationship shows no cracks or seams, these other two couplings are in a constant state of crumbling. As George sinks deeper into the investigation, and Kathryn increasingly appears implicated, the question becomes not just whether his wife’s allegiance has been compromised, but what George will do to protect her.
The second offering in as many months to hit local screens from exceptionally productive auteur Steven Soderbergh, Black Bag also bears the distinction of being his finest work since at least Logan Lucky in 2017. A sleek, taut thriller, the film sees Soderbergh returning to the glossy surfaces and slyly thumping heartbeat of his finest work to produce a uniquely satisfying, mature spy vehicle.
Coming in at a fleet ninety minutes, one can be forgiven for expecting Soderbergh to go through the motions with a story that’s one part Hitchcock, one part Agatha Christie, one part John LeCarré. The director, however, signals his intentions to do something different early in the piece, with an exceptional, extended dinner party sequence involving the three couples at George and Kathryn’s house that’s thrillingly complex and involving. Soderbergh lingers at the table, slowly pulling at the threads of these characters we know very little about, monitoring body language and delighting in the specificities of Hollywood stalwart David Koepp’s dialogue. The supporting cast is up to the challenge — there are no weak links, but Marisa Abela’s newbie really shines, layering in both vulnerability and an element of sexual hunger in her aspiration to come under the wing of George. ‘When are you going to polygraph me, George?’ she propositions at the dinner table, the way others might pursue a one night stand. Like the agents they portray, both Fassbender and Blanchett are old pros with this kind of material, but Fassbender is particularly impressive, giving new shades to the secretly deeply emotional automaton despite playing the part to perfection already in both Prometheus and The Killer. Dare I say he’s perfected the type here, his George surging with panic and genuine affection, often conveying all this with just a small flicker of the eyes or a twitch of the lip.
Like any good spy flick, Black Bag is ultimately about how populating a cold, calculating intelligence apparatus with impulsive, egotistical, horny denizens will inevitably lead to failure and death. Sex is transactional here, but also deeply wounding, the spies all cheating on each other out of a defensive preparedness for the inevitable implosion of their relationships, as much as genuinely wanting to look elsewhere. Each is in outright denial, even mockery of the fact that they might have feelings for one another — that is, except for Kathryn and George, who have somehow perfected the formula of monogamy in a world where betrayal is essentially encouraged. Soderbergh and Koepp are quite clearly using the world of espionage as a way of exploring the internecine dynamics of modern relationships, how some are seemingly naturally suited to genuine coupledom while others flounder in their wake. It ensures that, for all the paranoia, doubt and reversals that populate Black Bag’s narrative, it is ultimately a genuinely romantic film, albeit tinged with an acidic tartness. Soderbergh’s direction bears the astute simplicity of an old master, barely wasting a second of runtime and conveying volumes with the utmost minimum of parts and assembly. While it doesn’t rise to the level of his finest work, it is thrilling to witness Soderbergh this locked in and purposeful. It’s a side of him you’d be forgiven to have suspected we’d never see again.
Black Bag is in cinemas now.