Producers: Casey Silver and Gregory Jacobs Director: Steven Soderbergh Screenplay: David Koepp Cast: Cate Blanchett, Michael Fassbender, Marisa Abela, Tom Burke, Naomie Harris, Regé-Jean Page, Pierce Brosnan, Gustaf Skarsgård, Kae Alexander, Orli Shuka and Daniel Dow Distributor: Focus Features
Grade: B+
The latest collaboration between Steven Soderbergh (who not only directs but serves as his own cinematographer under the pseudonym Peter Andrews and as editor under the name Mary Ann Bernard) and writer David Koepp is a clever but basically inconsequential tale of skullduggery in the British intelligence service. It’s Le Carré Lite, but elegantly constructed and acted, as enjoyable as the popular “Knives Out” puzzlers.
The plot begins with imperturbable George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) being assigned by his superior Meacham (Gustaf Skarsgård) the task of uncovering the identity of a mole in the agency who’s stolen the operational plan of the story’s MacGuffin, Severus. The device can be employed, we’ve eventually told, to set off a disastrous reaction in a nuclear plant.
George is given the names of five suspects. The first four are Freddie Smalls (Tom Burke), a boozer and womanizer irked over being passed over for promotion; Col. James Stokes (Regé-Jean Page), a ramrod-stiff military type; Clarissa Dubose (Marisa Abela), a saucy data analyst; and Dr. Zoe Vaughan (Naomie Harris), the agency’s resident therapist. The fifth, Meacham explains apologetically, is Woodhouse’s own wife, coolly glamorous Kathryn St. Jean (Cate Blanchett).
George’s methods are simplified by the fact that the four outsiders are romantically involved, Freddie with Clarissa and Zoe with James. So he invites them all over for dinner with him and Kathryn, loosening their tongues with some food additives to provide him with clues to follow. He then spices things up with a nasty parlor game to encourage inadvertent revelations.
Beyond saying that his scheme works, it would be churlish to go into too much detail about what follows. Suffice it to note that as events unfold there will be, in no particular order, a murder; a clandestine meeting with the emissary (Orli Shuka) of an ambitious Russian expatriate (Daniel Dow); a secret Swiss bank account with a substantial balance; a drone attack; secret surveillance of an agent via satellite; and the disposal of a body in a lake. Not to mention a marathon run of polygraph tests, presented by director-editor Soderbergh in a cheekily insouciant montage. And lurking behind everything is the agency’s supremely supercilious head Arthur Steiglitz (Pierce Brosnan), who, in one simultaneously hilarious and upsetting scene, shows a predilection for lunching on Ikizukuri.
In everything that happens is an undercurrent of infidelity, whether it be in terms of treason to one’s country or faithlessness in personal relationships. It’s revealed early on that Meacham, who instigates George’s search for the mole, is at odds with his wife Anna (Kae Alexander). And when Freddie’s dalliances with other women confirm Clarissa’s suspicions, her reaction is one of the film’s major shocks.
But the chief marital question, of course, revolves around George and Kathryn. Protocol requires them to keep professional secrets from one another—“black bag” is the shorthand all the agents use to refer to some part of the job they can’t divulge to anyone—and each of the spouses keeps things from one another over the course of the week George has been allotted for his investigation. Is their frequently-expressed devotion a ruse? Is Kathryn the traitor her husband will have to expose?
All will be resolved by the close of this delicious if not terribly nutritious confection, stylishly appointed by production designer Philip Messina and costumer Ellen Mirojnick and given added verve by David Holmes’s jazz-inflected score. The performances are spot-on, with Blanchett’s icily seductive, coyly suggestive Kathryn a perfect counterpoint to Fassbender’s George, penetratingly intense under his sly show of reserve. (A story early on about his treatment of his own father is a jewel.) All of the others encapsulate their characters’ personalities—Burke Freddie’s petulant defensiveness, Abela Clarissa’s impudent assertiveness, Page James’s rigorous self-confidence, and Harris Vaughan’s prim professional demeanor. Brosnan, meanwhile, is enormously amusing as a James Bond type gone to seed.
Ultimately “Black Bag” is an exercise in gamesmanship, on the part of both the characters and the filmmakers and actors who have fashioned them with such finesse. If in the end the game doesn’t prove to amount to much—there’s none of the dark introspection about spycraft that one finds in Le Carré—it’s certainly pleasurable to watch the twists and turns as they play out.