Married Spies Fassbender and Blanchett Keep Their Secrets in a Black Bag

The last time Michael Fassbender engaged in international espionage for director Steven Soderbergh, he got the absolute shit kicked out of him. Perhaps the most memorable sequence in Haywire involves the film’s freelancing black-ops heroine, played by Gina Carano, posing as the wife of an MI6 agent played by Fassbender, only to realize she’s being set up. The two then fight in a hotel room, pummeling, strangling, and straddling each other with a kind of creepy intimacy before she shoots him dead through a pillow. It’s like a scene out of a James Bond movie, only Bond winds up limp on the floor.

Fassbender isn’t playing the same character in Black Bag, Soderbergh’s new spy thriller, but his George Woodhouse seems like the type of chap who has studied those sorts of case files intently, determined to puzzle his way out well before it comes to fisticuffs in eveningwear. At Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre, he’s known as a master of the polygraph-led interrogation, and after he receives a shortlist of five possible moles at the agency in the film’s opening scene, he throws a small dinner party for his coworkers. Presumably the four invited guests are all on that list. The fifth name, we know for sure, is Kathryn (Cate Blanchett) – George’s wife. She has agency business later that week, out of town. Where, George asks? “Black bag,” which is spy-spouse-speak for “no comment.” Agents are left with little choice but hooking up with each other; even between agents who know the deal, the mechanics of a secret work trip are not so different from arranging an affair. The other attendees know this, too, even if they’re not so certain that the given solution actually works. James (Regé-Jean Page) is dating staff psychiatrist Zoe (Naomie Harris), while Freddie (Tom Burke) is seeing Clarissa (Marisa Abela), who later asks George how his marriage – any marriage in this world, really – can possibly work.

So much attention is paid to this dinner scene that it may seem as if Soderberg has performed a bait-and-switch of his own, and turned a spy thriller into a single-location chamber piece. That’s not quite what he’s after, but the opening does lay out the characters, relationships, and thematic concerns with great efficiency. When Soderbergh cuts around the table to a series of repeated angles, legible individually but disorienting in succession, it suggests the chilliness of surveillance, as if we’re seeing through an unseen camera and George’s eyes simultaneously. Kathryn is in on the basic plan, but not that she’s one of the five being surveilled. Or does she know this, too?

Much, though not all, of Black Bag sticks with George’s point of view as he semi-privately investigates the mole and a potential theft of a major digital weapon, possibly incriminating himself while doing so. It’s 20 or 30 minutes in before we do get a scene without him, when Kathryn has a mandatory appointment with Zoe. If it doesn’t seem quite right for a psychiatrist to hold a session with someone whose home they’ve just visited for a confession-laden dinner, Kathryn is way ahead of you. Without slackening its tension, Black Bag sometimes resembles a bitter comedy of manners, which are apparently also kept in the black bag for certain stretches. These are people who like to tell each other what they find irretrievably boring, especially if it’s each other, whether or not they’re even telling the truth about their disdain.

George, though, fancies himself above this kind of sniping. “I don’t like liars,” he says, with a compulsion that verges on childlike. There’s a monomania behind his work, an analytical obsessiveness that suits Fassbender’s icy persona, then takes it a step or two further. This sleek, sexy man is also kind of a giant nerd, fastidiously changing his shirt when he notices a few barely-visible blotches on his sleeve, the light often glinting off the dark, thick frames of his eyeglasses. Given the director’s prolific sense of control, George could be a bit of director self-portraiture – maybe having a bit of a laugh at his own expense, placing such an exacting, dead-serious gamemaster next to a more sensual, movie-starry Blanchett.

Regardless, the film provides opportunity to reflect on how far Soderbergh has come since the stagy confrontations of Sex, Lies, and Videotape. Black Bag strives less openly for provocation, but it’s arguably a sexier, and certainly a sleeker, piece of work. Trusting, as usual, no one but himself to serve as cinematographer, Soderbergh amplifies and blows out every visible interior light source, for images that maintain that little bit of distortion at their edges, even when he’s capturing the well-appointed warmth of George and Kathryn’s home (which still skews sickly yellow, in one of his later-period visual signatures).

Coming off the formal experiment of Presence, as well as the formal experiment of, well, most of his filmography, Soderbergh has inspired some grumbling about when he’ll get back to “real” movies, presumably a bigger-budget studio flex akin to his Ocean’s 11 or Traffic. Black Bag, a Fassbender/Blanchett spy picture from Universal subsidiary Focus Features, would seem to fit the bill; it’s got glamor, humor, and a screenplay from Hollywood mainstay David Koepp (who wrote Presence and Kimi, but also Jurassic Park and Spider-Man). Yet it’s also relatively spare – while the movie is more than dinner scenes, the total cast members number under 20; the running time hovering around 90 minutes – and has the dexterity of a genre workout. The truth is, the experimental Soderbergh and the slick studio Soderbergh have long since merged, and Black Bag, a fusion of marriage and espionage that could have come out 80 years out with a few tweaks for content, is the perfect example. The experiments are the real thing.

Director: Steven Soderbergh
Writer: David Koepp
Starring: Michael Fassbender, Cate Blanchett, Naomie Harris, Marisa Abela, Regé-Jean Page, Tom Burke, Pierce Brosnan
Release Date: March 14, 2023

Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including A.V. Club, GQ, Decider, the Daily Beast, and SportsAlcohol.com, where offerings include an informal podcast. He also co-hosts the New Flesh, a podcast about horror movies, and wastes time on social media under the handle @rockmarooned.