“The secret of a happy marriage remains a secret.” — Henny Youngman
Boundaries are important in any relationship, much less a till-death-do-us-part union in which both parties are spies involved in highly classified operations for a British intelligence agency. Steven Soderbergh and David Koepp get it. They understand the need for a little space between the personal and the professional when the fate of the world is at stake. Which is why the director and screenwriter of Black Bag have devised an easy one-stop-shop solution for the couple at the center of their espionage thriller. George (Michael Fassbender) is one of the top-ranking officers overseeing the United Kingdom’s National Cyber Security Centre. Kathyrn (Cate Blanchett) is a field agent, given the kind of assignments that require deep cover and high levels of classification. They love their work. They love each other even more.
So whenever George is curtailing potential threats and Kathyrn is rushing out to parts unknown, they don’t share the details of their respective endeavors. All of the pertinent-yet-verboten info goes into what they call the “black bag.” It’s mutually off-limits, an inaccessible interzone of intel, metaphorical territory more neutral than Switzerland. What are you working on? “Black bag.” Who are you tracking? “Black bag.” Where are you going for three days? “Black bag.” Those two words equal no-more-questions. You get the feeling that this symbolic gesture is the key to their successful marriage.
Naturally, someone’s gotta throw a live grenade into the mix. George gets a tip from a fellow agency spook that there’s a rat in the house. A top-secret software program known as Severus — as in the assassinated Roman emperor, though a MacGuffin by any name smells just as sweet — seems to have left the building. There’s chatter that a person within the organization may be trying to sell it to the highest bidder. Should it get into the wrong hands, the fragile bonds between world powers would be severely stress-tested, etc. There’s a list of suspects that George has to investigate, in the hopes of identifying the culprit behind all of this. Would you care to guess which female agent’s name tops that list?
Soderbergh and Koepp are coming fresh off a collaboration that doubled as a subgenre deconstruction — Presence, which ran a haunted-house story through a Eugene O’Neill-family-melodrama filter — so you’d think the duo might be chasing something similar for spy movies. Or, barring that, they’d deliver their own version of a Mr. and Mrs. Smith-style action flick, where love means never having to say you’re sorry yet may involve a shootout or two. Really, who wouldn’t want to see a dapper Fassbender, decked out like prime-1960s Michael Caine in The Ipcress File, and a sultry Blanchett trade banter and bullets?
Instead, the filmmakers drill down on the psychology of this couple’s check and balances, and how the dynamic of their “ideal” work-life relationship creates ripple effects around them. Black Bag wants nothing more than to be Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf if written by John le Carré, an unexpectedly perfect peanut-butter-meets-chocolate combo even if you didn’t know that the Edward Albee play was a touchstone from the jump. (Credit Koepp for showing restraint and not simply naming the protagonists George and Martha.) That they manage to pull it off without sacrificing the joys of these cloak-and-dagger potboilers, give both its movie-star leads and a crack supporting ensemble plenty to chew on, and hit every beat with a coolness that would put a subzero refrigerator to shame is nothing short of a miracle. It’s a great espionage thriller, and an even better scenes-from-a-marriage drama. Ian Fleming would love this. So would Ingmar Bergman.
Kathryn, it should be said, may be a prime suspect regarding this security breach, but she’s not the only one. George decides the best way to test the waters to see who floats and who flails is to throw a dinner party at their house. Stay away from the chana masala, he advises his wife. It contains a narcotic that acts as a truth serum. She’s not keen on dosing co-workers, or completely sure what George is up to, but hey: black bag. Cue Blanchett’s best Mona Lisa smile. You can already sense the hardcore Nick-and-Nora chemistry between her and Fassbender, which is the only thing more potent in that household than the drugs in the curry.
The guest list includes James (Bridgerton‘s Regé-Jean Page), recently promoted to George’s second-in-command; Zoe (Naomie Harris), the agency’s resident therapist who’s dating James, as well as being assigned to analyze both him and Kathryn; Freddie (Tom Burke), a promiscuous alcoholic and fellow NCSC employee who was up for the second-in-command gig and didn’t get it; and Clarissa (Industry‘s Marisa Abel), a data expert involved with Freddie. Each of them are flattered to be invited. None of them fully trust their host, who has a reputation as a pit bull when it comes to separating what’s true and what’s false. All of them except George and Kathryn try the masala, after which George suggests they all play a little post-dinner game.
From left: Regé-Jean Page, Naomie Harris, Michael Fassbender, Cate Blanchett, Tom Burke, and Marisa Abela in Black Bag.
Claudette Barius/Focus Features
What follows is a roughly 12-minute sequence which begins with woozy revelations and ends with someone’s hand being impaled by a steak knife — a standout set piece that’s both a showcase and a pacesetter for the rest of the film. (See it a second time, and pay attention to whom Soderbergh, editing the film under his usual nom de splice Mary Ann Bernard, cuts away to and when.) From here, Black Bag starts moving its chess pieces around the board, keeping its eye on George as he follows possible leads, pulls on threads, sets traps. Red herrings and dead bodies pop up, as does Pierce Brosnan as the Centre’s big boss; we offer our congratulations on the actor’s rising up the spy-movie ranks, even if it means trading in his license to kill for a permit allowing him to ham it up. As for Kathryn’s unexpected need to go abroad for a few days — the destination? Black bag, my dear — her work trip sets off a chain reaction in which George’s strength, i.e., faith in their relationship, becomes his weakness.
You sense that double crosses and the usual spy-vs-spy skullduggery are waiting in the wings. Yet thanks to Koepp’s extraordinary gift for writing character-based dramas masquerading as genre exercises, the cast for making the most of this gift (no weak links here), and Soderbergh’s ability to ringmaster all of it with a surfeit of style and forward momentum, even the familiar parts feel fresh. The director knows how to deconstruct like a giddy film-school undergrad, but he also has respect for craft that channels the golden-age studio pros that comes in extremely handy here. On the page, a sequence in which Zoe and Kathryn have a testy session might read as tangential, even if the dialogue sings. Watching it onscreen, however, you notice the way the power struggle keeps seesawing, how the two actors keep adding subtle shadings to the feints and parries, and the simple but undeniable effectiveness of a shot/reverse shot setup when someone knows how to properly employ this age-old trick.
Still, Black Bag boils down to two people, bound together by love and the boundaries they so doggedly keep — because, as George constantly reminds those who inquire, “this is how it works.” Yes, their relationship gets tested. It’s that same commitment to each other, as well as an understanding that what goes in the safe-space sack stays there, that saves the union and saves the day. You don’t need the fate of the world at stake to recognize that. Soderbergh and company have given us a remarkably fun riff on international intrigue. They also slip in a wonderfully intimate portrait of a couple who turn each other on as much as the movie turns you on. See it with someone you love.
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