With Black Bag, Steven Soderbergh makes the case for his personal ruthless effectivity.
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 acquired 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 velocity with which Soderbergh has hopped from style train to style train of late is somewhat dizzying; he’s pumped out works of horror, romance, thriller, and comedy all since 2020. His ability with every, nonetheless, is tough to disclaim.
Black Bag, just like the latest Soderbergh motion pictures Presence and Kimi, was written by David Koepp; he’s a Hollywood stanchion who’s greatest recognized 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 simple. The glamorous Kathryn St. Jean (Blanchett) is a famend British spy who’s accused of being a double agent by an nameless tipster. The massive brass duties the preening, excessively kempt George Woodhouse (Fassbender) with investigating her and another colleagues in an effort 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 dwelling that’s a den of sophistication, sophistication, and potential sabotage. Soderbergh has discovered the 2 excellent 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, cover 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 folks 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 high mole-hunter, George can’t take fairly as brutal or direct an strategy together with his spouse. Thus, he should resort to bouncing his suspicions off her co-workers—carried out by a fine-tuned group of gifted 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 (recognized for Business and the latest 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 uninterested in George’s parlor video games, whereas Pierce Brosnan lurks within the background as a disapproving boss. Soderbergh properly 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 closing reveals. Although it has the identical intimacy of many a Soderbergh effort of late—he tends to work shortly 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 places of work of the British intelligence companies everybody works for, or George and Kathryn’s seductive and candlelit dwelling, a welcoming atmosphere that shortly turns right into a pit of vipers when all of the spies sit down for a meal.
Will Soderbergh ever make one other really huge film? Black Bag had me serious about a few of his previous hits, resembling Ocean’s Eleven; these had been giant 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 largely confined. The outcome, whereas self-contained, is gripping, quietly horny, 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 possibly someday 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.