Jason Bailey
Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag opens with a hard cut in, camera in motion, following a man down a street and into a nightclub. “LONDON – FRIDAY” reads the on-screen text. Who is this man? Why is he in London? What’s significant about Friday? What’s going on? it’s a classic Soderbergh opening: parachuting us in to the action and the last possible moment, assuming we’ll figure out what’s happening soon enough, because he is a filmmaker (and one of few these days) who assumes his audience is at least as smart as he is.
And we do figure it out, from the first dialogue scene, which comes shortly thereafter; the man is George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender), an analyst with the NCSC (the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre). There is a leak somewhere in the organization — “a stranger in our house,” as one of the higher-ups puts it — and one of the names that ticks the boxes is George’s wife Kathryn St. Jean (Cate Blanchett), a field agent. George has been tasked with finding the rat, and potentially eliminating them. “If it is Catherine, do you really think you can do that?” he’s asked. It’s not an easy question to answer.
So the stakes are clear (and high) from the jump, which is the real key to Soderbergh’s style these days: efficiency. It’s not just a question of efficiency in labor (though he’s certainly a prime example of that; for years now, he’s not only directed his films, but shot and edited them under pseudonyms, and his credits are filled with longtime collaborators). He is perhaps our most noteworthy practitioner of narrative efficiency. While major studios are releasing tentpole slop, crafted by hacks, with nearly three-hour running times, Soderbergh is operating at a gallop. The mole hunt is one of the most familiar stories in espionage fiction, so he doesn’t waste screen time with the parts we already know. He’s more interested in the variations.
The first of them comes early, when we learn about the primary couple, their tactics, and the personalities and motivations of the supporting players via… a dinner party sequence. How divine! How refined! The gathered spooks of the intelligence agency trade quips and digs before George announces “I have a game,” and the Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf echoes are certainly not accidental (Soderbergh is such an admirer of Mike Nichols’s film version that he joins the director on its audio commentary). They predict it will go poorly, and they are correct — accusations fly, dirty laundry is aired, and even a bit of blood is shed. But the most important information is a backstory about George investigating and revealing the adulterous actions of his father. “I don’t like liars,” he explains.
You can probably guess the vagaries of where this is going — he’ll catch his wife in a tiny lie and zero in until she starts looking guilty, or does she — though credit where due to the screenwriter David Koepp (another Soderbergh regular, who also penned Kimi and last January’s Presence) for a fair number of turns and surprises. But what makes his script special are the personalities involved, people who are all wicked smart, fiercely efficient, and emotionally brutal. Since they’re all Brits, there’s an abundance of dry wit in the dialogue; they spend less time shooting at each other than sneering at each other, and that’s frankly more entertaining.
That so many of them are in relationships — there are two key couples besides George and Kathryn, and more will reveal themselves — becomes the subject of the movie, more than the dangerous tech that they’re tracking, which is basically a MacGuffin anyway. These are, after all, people who are required to not only lie and deceive for a living; they’re frequently involved in activities that involve destinations and objectives that they can’t even share with their partner. “How do you tell the truth about anything?” one asks, and it’s a good question.
It’s posed by Clarissa, who may or may not be a low-level participant; she’s played by Marisa Abela, and she’s the real find of the movie, sexy and funny in equally dangerous doses. (Her primary previous credit was that Amy Winehouse biopic, and let’s not hold that against her.) Blanchett isn’t really stretching here — she could play this kind of purring enigma blindfolded, but she can still do it well. And Fassbender has a good time deconstructing his own performance, accurately gauging the delight of watching this cool customer, this man who seems to have spent his life one step ahead, absolutely crumbling when things start going embarrassingly sideways.
Black Bag’s timing (wholly accidental, of course) is sort of hilarious, hitting theaters just as the Broccoli family and Amazon have made a deal that will allow the streamer to take the venerable James Bond franchise and, most likely, turn it into “content.” So we’ve had the usual cycle of fan-casting and conjecture, contemplating both who could play Bond next, and (a trickier question, frankly) who could take the reins and guide the series into its next iteration. And here comes Steven Soderbergh, quietly directing a better spy movie than, let’s be honest, most of the Bonds — and widely winking by casting both the most recent Moneypenny (Naomie Harris) and the last Bond (Pierce Brosnan) in key roles. Maybe he’ll find himself in the conversation for the job, but I’m struck by one of Fassbender’s early lines: “I wanted to try something more elegant first.” That’s not just dialogue. That’s Soderbergh’s entire ethos.
A-
“Black Bag” is in theaters this weekend.
