‘Black Bag’ is a Slam-Bang Thriller from Steven Soderbergh
Steven Soderbergh's spicy spy thriller "Black Bag" comes packed with sharp twists, intrigue, and innuendo.
Most A-list filmmakers in the streaming era would be glad, and lucky, to have one decent feature hit theaters in a year. So, snaps up to Steven Soderbergh, back with his second slam-bang film this season, following up January’s nifty haunted house thriller Presence with the wily spy thriller Black Bag.
Soderbergh and Presence screenwriter David Koepp load up the sex, lies, and video files for this taut tale of a search for the snake hiding within a nest of secret agents. The top agent, George Woodhouse, portrayed with cool determination by Michael Fassbender, is tasked with rooting out a mole embedded in a black-ops division of British intelligence. Among his list of suspects is his own wife, Kathryn, played with a sly glint in her eye by a brashly brunette Cate Blanchett.
A cultured, high-living London pair, George and Kathryn are part of an attractive group of friends including two other couples — Jimmy (Regé-Jean Page) and Zoe (Naomie Harris), and Freddie (Tom Burke) and Clarissa (Marisa Abela) — all of them agents. One of this group is the traitor.
If interrogation expert George has to subject them all to a polygraph test before serving them another of his scrumptious gourmet dinners, then that is what he’ll do, methodically and dispassionately. Fassbender’s got the guy’s icy precision down to a science.
Soderbergh opens with a winding tracking shot following George into a basement nightclub and a clandestine meeting, and you can tell even from the back of Fassbender’s head that this man means business. Later, over a tense dinner-for-six straight out of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, George probes his guests mercilessly, aiming to weed out the liar.
The mystery takes its time to coalesce, but soon, secrets start to spill, and cracks begin to show in the group’s professional allegiances, as well as their romantic partnerships. Morally speaking, everyone’s compromised. As Clarissa points out, they all lie for a living.
Perceptive, but not yet jaded, Clarissa registers as the fun spy in the group. Abela, who, frankly, did not impress as Amy Winehouse in last year’s Back to Black, is a standout among heavy-hitters, lending a deftly insouciant vibe to the group’s youngest member.
Clarissa seems to take perverse pleasure in facing George’s inquisition, at one point asking, “When are you gonna poly me, George?” Her query sounds like a come-on and an unmistakable suggestion that these close friends might be talking about more than just polygraphs.
The revelation, fairly unsurprising, that one or more of the six are fooling around with someone else in the group who is not their partner, opens the mind to consider all possible configurations of the three couples. This might be a polyamorous party, at least metaphorically.
The reading holds, if we view George as de facto head of a romantic polycule dutifully shaking down his partners in an effort to resolve whatever turbulence threatens group stability.
Even just as subtext, the polyamory angle fits the film’s mature sensibility, and it’s more intriguing than the movie’s conventional spy adventure subplot about the traitor getting their hands on a doomsday device called Severus, stowed on a thumb drive.
The hunt for Severus, and the implications of it falling into the wrong hands, prompt the film’s brief bits of big-budget espionage action. But jail breaks and drone strikes, it turns out in this case, can’t match the intensity of the blistering action around George and Kathryn’s dinner table.
Black Bag (★★★☆☆) is rated R and playing in theaters nationwide. Visit www.fandango.com.
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