Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett lead a sleek espionage thriller from Steven Soderbergh.
By James Verniere/Boston Movie News
High-stakes espionage is a metaphor for marriage in veteran indie auteur Steven Soderbergh’s “Black Bag,” a puzzle film written by mega-scribe David Koepp of the Jurassic Park, Mission Impossible, Indiana Jones, and more franchises. Soderbergh and Koepp also collaborated on this year’s haunted (Or is it?) house movie “Presence” and the pandemic thriller “Kimi” (2022).
This time out, they have concocted a bunch of imaginary MI-6-7-8 or 9-type amoral, back-stabbing, serially screwing (and beautiful) British spooks. The film opens with a haute cuisine dinner cooked by chef-level spymaster George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender), while wife and fellow spook Kathryn (Cate Blanchett, playing another Kate) plays maitre d’. Almost all the players attend. These include company psychologist Zoe Vaughn (Miss Moneypenny herself Naomie Harris), who knows where all the psychic scars are, and scheming second-in-charge Freddy (Tom Burke), who is having an affair with the hot, hot-headed, ecstasy-using super-technician Clarissa (star-to-be Marisa Abela of the underappreciated Amy Winehouse biopic “Back to Black”). Also at the table is Stokes (Rege-Jean Page of “Bridgerton”), who has secret meetings with George in his boathouse and in a boat on a small lake (“Shades of “An American Tragedy”). After the vinous meal, Clarissa accuses the men of “priapic lunging” (that’s Koepp showing off his world-class wordsmith cred). Freddy tells her she’s “psychotic.” At about the same time, someone George met in an opening sequence dies horribly of an obvious poisoning. George and Kathryn go to see a film titled “Dark Windows.” (Is it this one?)
“Black Bag” (the title refers to an expression that means “top secret” or “classified”) tells the week-long story of George and Kathryn and their attempts to protect one another at whatever cost and of someone in their group who has stolen a MacGuffin named Severus (as in Snape?) which causes nuclear reactors to meltdown. Every now and then, we see a caption telling us what day of the week it is (Necessary? Really? No). Did I mention that the one who rules them all is a man named Stieglitz, played by none other than former 007 Pierce Brosnan. Did they write that red nose into the script because Brosnan had a bad cold while filming? I find films of this kind, however clever, too obviously “constructed” from shiny bits of screenwriting formulas and other dark magic, and in this case, I found much of the action rather bloodless, even if there was brain matter and gore sprayed across the wallpaper or a G-Wagon exploded, tumbled and set ablaze by a large drone. Why? Because there is no one to root for or care about. Robotic George and haughty Kathryn have none of the chemistry of Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Instead of wondering what was behind all the cloak-and-dagger shenanigans. I was wondering how these 50-ish actors have the body weight of teenagers and frozen faces.
Brosnan, who is not in the film much, has well-earned wrinkles and a silver mane. He’s still a handsome SOB. Fassbender does not have a strand of gray in his chestnut locks, a look I frankly find weird. Speaking of Bond, the futuristic décor is worthy of Bond wizard Ken Adam (one interior resembles a minimalist take on the war room in Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Loved to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb”), and the London views are spectacular. Blanchett changes the register of her voice as she speaks her lines, turning her vocal performance into a rival of the jazzy bass-and-percussion score by “Ocean’s 11” veteran David Holmes for our attention. Blanchett makes Kathryn so haughty she floats above the screen like Baron Harkonnen of those sandworm-bedeviled “Dune” movies. Also musical is a montage of “polys” (i.e., polygraph tests) administered meticulously by George to all those suspected by Steiglitz of “a breech.” On the small lake by himself, George putters around in a rowboat with an electric outboard motor, fishing for trout, if not breeches.
Speaking of Soderbergh’s “Ocean’s 11” films, “Black Bag” with its twists and turns and reveals and shocking surprises will remind many viewers of them. I am certainly not the only critic who is going to point out that Fassbender recycles his performance as evil android David in those misguided “Alien” sequels. Page is more commanding than he has been before. I can now see him as a Bond contender. We learn that a young George accused his own father, a fellow spy, of some “breech,” giving another spin to the good old Oedipal complex, the screenwriters’ Holy Grail. How much money do blockbuster writer Koepp and director Soderbergh, who now has made 53 films, spend on shrinks, do you think, to grasp why they are so marvelously gifted, and we are such hacks? Did detestable George slip a drug to loosen tongues into the garam masala? I certainly hope so. Pass the sauce, please.
‘Black Bag’
Rating: R, profanity, violence, sexual references.
Cast: Cate Blanchett, Michael Fasbender, Naomie Harris
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Writer: David Koepp
Running Time: 1 hour, 33 minutes
Where to Watch: Coolidge Corner Theater, AMC Boston Common, AMC Causeway and other suburban theaters.
Grade: B+
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