The demise of the mid-budget movie is something that film lovers have been documenting for the past few decades, with increasing alarm. It used to be that, in between the blockbusters and arthouse indies, you could watch a movie starring A-list actors geared towards adults. Steven Soderbergh was one of the reigning filmmakers of these kind of no-muss, no-fuss movies, helming star-powered capers or smart dramas that never tried to appeal to the inattentive masses who watched from behind their phones. And, like a captain going down with his ship as a small string quartet plays a mournful dirge, Soderbergh is still championing the kind of smart, satisfying mid-budget movie with his latest, the wildly fun spy thriller Black Bag.
Black Bag stars Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett as George and Kathryn Woodhouse, a married couple who work together at an unnamed British intelligence agency. George and Kathryn are seemingly the perfect couple: they’ve managed to balance their double lives and maintain a slavish devotion to each other — as well as find the time to host fancy dinner parties with their coworkers. The secret lies in the term “black bag,” a phrase they employ with each other when their work is highly confidential. But their perfect marriage is put in jeopardy when George, whose specialty lies in rooting out liars, discovers a mole at their agency. And among the list of suspects: Kathryn.
Soderbergh and screenwriter David Koepp, with whom he first collaborated on the fascinating ghost-movie experiment, Presence, weave a maze-like narrative full of twists and turns that manage to keep you on your toes, even if we’ve seen many a spy thriller like this before (look to just a few months ago, in which Fassbender played a very similar role in the spy series, The Agency). But the difference between Soderbergh and any regular journeyman director who might tackle this genre is that, despite how many times we’ve seen this story, despite how many plot twists audiences think they can predict, Soderbergh knows how to make every new turn so damn fun.
A lot of it resides in the fact that he’s employed such a top-tier cast of British actors, which include Regé-Jean Page, Pierce Brosnan, Naomie Harris, Tom Burke, and Marisa Abela. Each of George’s suspects are sexually or emotionally intertwined in some way, with Koepp and Soderbergh playing up some of these soapier elements in deliciously sordid ways, while highlighting the innate charismatic strengths of underrated actors like Page, Harris, and Burke.
Soderbergh might be one of the best “actor’s directors,” so skilled is he at guiding an ensemble to be at their charismatic best. Fassbender and Blanchett are both at the top of their game, sizzling with a terrifyingly powerful heat whenever they share the screen together, while still maintaining a veneer of distrust with each other. Blanchett is terrifically opaque, as both George’s closest ally and his potential enemy. But Fassbender gets to play somewhat against type, as a slightly more nebbish take on the fastidious man of mystery that he’s played in The Agency. And no matter who they’re going toe-to-toe with among the rest of the supporting players — Fassbender’s dynamics with Page and Abela are especially terrific, while Blanchett gets to cross paths with Harris, Burke, and Brosnan in equally compelling sequences — Soderbergh makes each interaction feel electric. The movie is further aided by Soderbergh’s digital photography, which is sparse and moody — many rooms are backlit, leaving the daylight scenes to feel washed out (a choice that feels intentional to the film’s ambiguous narrative) while the nighttime scenes are full of inky blacks and shadows. But somehow, thanks to Soderbergh’s persistent use of Dutch angles and extreme low and high close-ups, even the simplest scene of two characters takes on new life. No one shoots two people talking in a room like Soderbergh, and Black Bag is a reminder of that.
But what really makes Black Bag so fun, more than any other recent spy thriller, is that Soderbergh and Koepp frame it much like a whodunit. The narrative is tight, taking place over little more than a week, while the cast is small, and the action is mostly contained to conference rooms and dinner parties — the aforementioned fancy dinner parties that George and Kathryn frequently host become a central fixture to the narrative. The espionage elements are almost secondary to the dinner-party standoffs, where George narrows down and confronts his suspects, bringing all the cloak-and-dagger elements to a shocking head.
Black Bag is a pulpy joy ride masquerading as a subdued, prestigious spy thriller. It’s as smart as a John le Carré espionage story, but it’s not afraid to show a little cleavage and blow up a few cars in service of being entertaining. That’s what makes Soderbergh the consummate mid-budget director — he’s not playing at being prestigious, he just makes movies that assume his audience is smart. And if they guessed the twist along the way, at least they had fun.
