'Black Bag' is the First Good Spy Movie in Years, and Soderbergh's Best Since 'High Flying Bird'
No one elevates a degraded genre like Steven Soderbergh, especially when he's just letting Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett do their thing.
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The “sexy spy thriller” has become a degraded genre. Possibly the most degraded genre. Seems like every five weeks, Netflix releases a new Mr. and Mrs. Smith knockoff in which a husband-and-wife or will-they-or-won’t-they team of sexy stars creep through hallways and yell things into radios in a story that’s never half as compelling as the inevitable bloopers reel during the credits (with all due respect to the Mr. and Mrs. Smith series on Amazon Prime, which was much better than it had any right to be). “Espionage thriller” is an easy catch-all, but what is “espionage” as depicted by any of these movies? Quipping into a headset? Wearing a tactical vest? It’s a genre that exists only as a comment on itself.
I’m not here to tell you that Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag is a gritty, realistic tale of real-life spying. I doubt anyone wants to watch someone stare at spreadsheets for 12 hours and give themselves Havana Syndrome anyway. It is, however, a sexy thriller that seems to have at least considered its subject matter deeply enough to use it as fodder for interesting situations, rather than just as a stock setting for another low-stakes hangout.
In Black Bag, Soderbergh reteams with David Koepp (his screenwriter from Presence and Kimi) for a tight, talky thriller about husband-and-wife MI6 agents played by Michael F. Assbender and Cate Blanchett. It feels like a perfectly assembled team on basically every level. Soderbergh is an experimental filmmaker, though he isn’t what we typically mean when we say “experimental filmmaker.” Normally that implies white elephants and conspicuous attempts to defy convention, whereas Soderbergh seems more likely to see a genre in the wild and think, “that looks fun, maybe I should try one of those?”
It’s an admirable approach — hard to blame guy for just wanting to try shit out — though it’s one that sometimes gives us Traffic and sometimes gives us The Laundromant. Soderbergh has made some of my favorite movies (and TV shows) of all time — Out of Sight, Magic Mike, The Knick — and nearly as many so forgettable I have to use Google to remember their names (No Sudden Move, Unsane). David Koepp is about as close as it gets to the Steven Soderbergh of screenwriting, with a body of work encompassing everything from classics to underrated classics to drivel. They’ve managed to bring out the best in each other in Black Bag, easily Soderbergh’s best since 2019’s High Flying Bird (that’s seven movies ago) and Koepp’s best since… Panic Room? Stir of Echoes? (Stir of Echoes had the misfortune of being a ghost movie released the same year as the Sixth Sense, but it’s actually great).
No one plays a hot little guy in a tight little black turtleneck like Michael Fassbender, and he plays another sentient turtleneck in Black Bag — George Woodhouse, a fastidious MI6 agent who specializes in human intelligence. He’s famous around the agency for knowing when people are lying. Which is why he’s been tasked with “finding the mole” — another agent who has been accused, wouldn’t you know it, of trying to sell a dangerous spyware doohickey called “Severus,” possibly to some nefarious slavs (those cabbage eaters are always causin’ trouble, aren’t the?).
In one of Black Bag’s first scenes, he gathers the whole gang together for a truth serum-spiked dinner party — Tom Burke as the lecherous drunk Freddie Smalls and his younger girlfriend, Clarissa Dubose, played by Industry’s Marisa Abela; strapping young field agent James Stokes (Rege-Jean Page*, of Bridgerton fame); and James’ older girlfriend, the agency psychiatrist, Zoe Vaughn (Naomie Harris). As the search for the mole heats up, all signs initially point to George’s wife, Kathryn St. Jean, played by Cate Blanchett.
It almost goes without saying that countless forgettable movies have been made out of almost identical ingredients. The name “Zoe Vaughn” alone has to have been in ten other movies already, only outpacing “Kathryn St. Jean” because the latter seemed too corny to even the corniest screenwriters. The beauty of Black Bag, other than the brilliant cast and fantastic costume and production design, is that it gets to the root of what would actually be challenging about being a spy, with a romantic and social circle that consists almost entirely of other spies. Namely, how does one build the trust required for a relationship when one’s work involves almost exclusively lying, being lied to, maintaining false identities, manipulation, and subterfuge? “Black bag” refers to the phrase George and Kathryn use with each other whenever the other has asked for information that their job has precluded them from divulging. Essentially, the spy version of a safe word.
Cate Blanchett used to grate on me the way Meryl Streep probably grated on people in the 80s and 90s, where her obvious acting aptitude was at times arguably a little too liberally deployed (Blanchett’s sickly coughs while playing an old woman in Benjamin Button come to mind). And yet, perhaps also like Streep, Blanchett has only developed more restraint with time and truly shines in anything slick and with a higher degree of built-in artifice. She doesn’t really need to chew scenery to steal scenes, and she plays sexy and slightly duplicitous better than just about anyone. She’s perfect as the wife that Fassbender is hopelessly in love with, partly because he’s slightly in awe and can never quite control her. And speaking of perfect casting, no one does “awestuck horniness” better than Fassbender.
If you can get past names like “Zoe Vaughn” and “Kathryn St. John” and a spyware McGuffin called “Severus,” Black Bag’s unabashed writerliness eventually starts to work in its favor. While there is some sporadic gunplay, the vast majority of the drama takes the form of intense, sexually charged conversations between impeccably dressed British schemers. Black Bag is a movie about lying, subterfuge, and infidelity, subjects that seem to reoccur throughout Soderbergh’s filmography, from his break-out indie Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989) on through to now. And as Out of Sight proved, he’s as good as it gets depicting hot relationships between people in complicated circumstances.
That’s not to say that the film isn’t also actually about espionage, it is, at one point drawing a darkly funny contrast between American-style spycraft, which mostly takes the form of figure out where Bad Guy is for drone strike, and the sophisticated information brokering this polycule of impeccably tailored fuckbuddies are doing. Probably only an American’s inherent inferiority complex could produce that plotline, but Black Bag isn’t exactly hopelessly anglofile either, despite the costuming.