The brand new movie Black Bag transposes a timeless spy-thriller premise into the story of a wedding.
Steven Soderbergh movies are like buses: There’s at all times one other one coming. This isn’t a grievance, precisely, however the director’s prolific nature is on my thoughts with every of his new initiatives—he launched Presence two months in the past, and he’s already received one other one? How a lot effort might he have put into it? Black Bag, a taut spy thriller starring Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender, is an argument for the filmmaker’s ruthless effectivity. Sure, the pace with which Soderbergh has hopped from style train to style train of late is just a little dizzying; he’s pumped out works of horror, romance, thriller, and comedy all since 2020. His ability with every, nonetheless, is difficult to disclaim.
Black Bag, just like the current Soderbergh films Presence and Kimi, was written by David Koepp; he’s a Hollywood stanchion who’s finest identified for main blockbusters together with Jurassic Park and Spider-Man. Now, although, Koepp is seemingly hell-bent on reviving the midsize characteristic that Hollywood has been lacking. His newest collaboration with Soderbergh, a cat-and-mouse story a few married pair of spies, is a throwback in some ways—however its observations concerning the intrusive nature of espionage work on their lives really feel sharply modern.
The setup is easy. The glamorous Kathryn St. Jean (Blanchett) is a famend British spy who’s accused of being a double agent by an nameless tipster. The large brass duties the preening, excessively kempt George Woodhouse (Fassbender) with investigating her and another colleagues with a view to root out the traitor. There’s a twist, in fact: Kathryn and George are married. The mega-spies reside collectively in a pristine London house that’s a den of sophistication, sophistication, and potential sabotage. Soderbergh has discovered the 2 good actors for this state of affairs; they’re spectacular but emotionless film stars who look glamorous even when they’re parked behind a laptop computer. Their dazzling facades, nonetheless, disguise unstated darkness.
Blanchett serves shiny, Hollywood oomph, whereas Fassbender is taking part in a fussy, British spin on the hit-man character he portrayed so effectively in David Fincher’s The Killer. George is a serious management freak whose freakery simply is perhaps getting the higher of him. His favourite pastime, it appears, is inviting individuals over for dinner and dosing the dishes with a reality serum. (“Keep away from the chana masala,” he warns his spouse.) That is the casual model of administering lie-detector assessments, his skilled speciality. However regardless of being a prime mole-hunter, George can’t take fairly as brutal or direct an strategy along with his spouse. Thus, he should resort to bouncing his suspicions off her co-workers—carried out by a fine-tuned group of proficient firm gamers.
Amongst them is Tom Burke (from The Memento and final yr’s Furiosa) as an agent with a proclivity for infidelity and booze; and Marisa Abela (identified for Trade and the current Amy Winehouse biopic) as a tech wiz and his on-and-off love curiosity. Naomie Harris and Regé-Jean Web page fill out the solid as extra skilled brokers rising bored with George’s parlor video games, whereas Pierce Brosnan lurks within the background as a disapproving boss. Soderbergh correctly leverages everybody’s fame to additional confuse the viewers: Fassbender’s on-screen tendency towards villainous roles makes him a disorienting protagonist to root for, whereas Blanchett’s pure gravitas renders her troublesome to not belief.
At a blissful 93 minutes lengthy, Black Bag retains audiences fortunately guessing earlier than dropping its last reveals. Although it has the identical intimacy of many a Soderbergh effort of late—he tends to work rapidly to maintain budgets low and entice big-name expertise—the director manages to squeeze in a few globe-trotting moments for some visible panache. But these international missions are largely glimpsed as surveillance on a pc display screen. Most of Black Bag is as a substitute set in enclosed areas: the oppressive clean workplaces of the British intelligence providers everybody works for, or George and Kathryn’s seductive and candlelit house, a welcoming surroundings that rapidly turns right into a pit of vipers when all of the spies sit down for a meal.
Will Soderbergh ever make one other really large film? Black Bag had me excited about a few of his previous hits, corresponding to Ocean’s Eleven; these have been massive ensemble items that had correct scope to them. Black Bag is midway there, though Soderbergh’s strategy has an artfulness to it; he’s telling a sweeping story whereas retaining the thrill principally confined. The consequence, whereas self-contained, is gripping, quietly attractive, and robustly acted. Plus, given the shortage of movies for grown-ups in theaters proper now, I can not complain a few good replace on the drawing-room thriller. However perhaps in the future I’ll sit Soderbergh down, give him a heavy serving to of George’s curried reality serum, and ask if he’d ever take into account making a grand motion epic once more.
