Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag is a really solid tribute to the work of John Le Carré. It is also a good demonstration that his breed of espionage thriller can still be effective in a modern context -though it also helps that we’re back to a place where the British and the Russians are on oppositional sides geopolitically. And there is a space to be made for it in a world where spy movies, when they do come along, are explicitly action-oriented. A good spy flick can be just as much a mystery movie and hold our attention, especially if it’s well-written by someone like David Koepp who, after Presence and KIMI, has struck up a very effective collaboration with Soderbergh I’d like to see continue.
Much like Le Carré’s best-known book, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, Black Bag is about an effort to root out a potential mole from a small selection of suspects embedded in the highest offices of British Intelligence -Michael Fassbender’s George Woodhouse even has the signature George Smiley glasses. But it is also about the intensely loyal relationship between George and his fellow spy wife Katherine (Cate Blanchett), who along with four other colleagues is suspected of leaking a dangerous cyber-weapon code-named “Severus” that could cause severe nuclear meltdowns destabilizing Russia but at the likely cost of thousands of lives. The laser-focused and extremely competent George is tasked with investigating his own wife for this, as well as the others in this compromised circle.
George and Katherine alike are enigmas -both intensely good at their work, unfailingly professional, and dispassionate -something that their cluster of friends thinks makes them a strangely perfect couple. Soderbergh stresses this well, working with both actors -though Fassbender especially- to keep the characters modulated, careful not to reveal their full feelings and motivations. As George starts tracking Katherine, finding implicating signs of her activity, it’s not clear how much he believes in them, or how much of a facade her assurances and statements of romance (though bereft of emotion) are towards him. And in playing a lot of subtleties to this, in embodying the aesthetics of a pencil-pusher who nevertheless carries immediate authority, Fassbender gives one of his better performances of recent years. He takes naturally to the meticulous attitude of this almost Holmes-like figure who would circumvent ethics and exploit security loopholes in pursuit of his goals. There is a challenge to question his moral authority, especially the deeper he gets and more personally invested he is forced to become -a danger at the heart of his commitments as implied in his romancing with Katherine. And it translates into a surprisingly formidable force.
Of course it is quite a gaggle of personalities that surround this shrewd couple, and each of them comes off compellingly too as the film’s conspiracy winds its way through each of them. Tom Burke as the real berk of an agent Freddie, very high on himself as he carries out an affair -the unprompted revealing of which by the omnipotent George results in his girlfriend Clarissa (Marisa Abela), a satellite imagery monitor, spontaneously injuring him. And James (Regé-Jean Page), probing and arrogant, is hardly better -he himself is in a relationship with office psychiatrist Zoe (Naomie Harris), privy to all manner of clandestine information that tests her Catholic morals. Each of them are fascinating foils of personality for George to contend with as the discreet nature of their work also informs the caution in their own movements. Motivations may be under the surface but it’s hard to gauge a true villain. Koepp’s script is very fine-tuned in this, but the performances are deft too, especially Abela, whose direct flirtatious dynamic with George makes for some of the more colourful scenes in a movie whose subject matter wouldn’t necessarily suggest them. In particular, her interplay with George over a polygraph test, transposed against similar tests for her colleagues, with the reveals of where she’s lying but no break in concentration showing in her face or mood, is really intriguing.
What’s also intriguing is how efficiently Soderbergh shoots the movie. It is not a glamourous kind of thriller that makes use of elite sets or exquisite locations -a farther-off cry from his Ocean’s movies you couldn’t find. The film is humble in design, even with the somewhat immaculate nature of both George and Katherine’s home and British Intelligence HQ. These are bare spaces, only modestly lit -but still the movie relates the scale of the stakes and their urgency through the subtle but attractive filmmaking and Soderbergh’s clear trust in his actors, keeping the focus on them and their nuances. There are a couple of scenes of George lightly interrogating a colleague while fishing in a small lake, equivalent perhaps to Smiley doing the same with someone on the tarmac of an airport runway -and yet this way, for being more intimate feels much more intense even though no Godfather-like threat is alluded to.
On top of it all, it's just a well plotted mystery, and Soderbergh clearly gets a thrill out of convening a Poirot-style gathering of all suspects to outline their individual motives and misdemeanours before identifying the culprit. It's relayed with a real strength of tension, George and Katherine the dominant forces at play, edging towards an explosive end -almost effortlessly thrilling, and again not by conventional parameters. Especially pertaining to that central relationship and the muted complexity of its tension -which to both parties may supersede any other loyalties. Ultimately, the film's plotting is such that it feels fully complete by the end, even with a little messiness of action along the way.
At just an hour and a half, Black Bag is a breezy movie that wastes no time as Soderbergh moves through its developments and intrigue with precision, his sharp visual and technical instincts married perfectly to a complete trust in his actors to carry what he and Koepp give them. I noted before the movie's classic Le Carré credentials, but it also just hearkens back to the kind of solidly produced mid-budget thrillers us cinephiles are always complaining are missing in the modern movie industry. There is a neglected audience that a movie such as this serves -and Soderbergh deftly captures them (he probably counts among them himself) with this sleek and engaging intellectual spy movie that perhaps doesn't deserve to be such an anomaly.
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