It is old hat to say that Steven Soderbergh’s movies are stylish, but a look through the auteur’s catalog inspires few descriptors that are more fitting. The director of 35 feature films since 1989’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Soderbergh knows when to begin and end a scene. He understands what characters should wear and how production design can alter the mood of entire setpieces. Most importantly, he grasps how to pace a movie, a dying art in an age of bloated comic-book extravaganzas. Put these gifts together, and one gets Black Bag, the director’s finest effort since Out of Sight (1998) and a serious contender for best picture of the year.
Black Bag begins as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? for the Vauxhall set. Instead of George and Martha, however, we have George and Kathryn, two British intelligence agents whose marriage to one another is at least as intriguing as dead drops and ciphers. Following a brief prologue in which a superior asks George to smoke out a mole, the pair host a dinner party for the prime suspects, two other couples whose romantic and professional motives have begun to blur. Though no one present kills an imaginary child, as Richard Burton did in the 1966 film, the party nevertheless crackles with a carnal energy that will have Edward Albee fans sitting up in their chairs.
For one thing, George has dosed the chicken masala with truth serum, a move that inspires exactly the wrong sorts of confessions. Agent Freddie Smalls (Tom Burke), for example, resents missing out on a recent promotion and is cheating on Clarissa Dubose (Marisa Abela), a satellite imagery technician with secrets of her own. While Col. James Stokes (Regé-Jean Page) and in-house psychiatrist Zoe Vaughan (Naomie Harris) seem cooler at a glance, their more recent connection is not without its emotional wounds.
Nor, for that matter, is George’s own domestic arrangement free from suspicion, a fact that produces more than one rumination on the nature of loyalty between trained deceivers. Asked too many questions by her husband, Kathryn retreats into operational silos. (“Sorry, that’s black bag.”) Yet who’s to say that guarded information is above board, particularly when, as George has reason to believe, his own wife may well be the malefactor he is hunting?
Played by Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett, George and Kathryn are easily Hollywood’s most compelling spy duo since Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys burned up the screen in The Americans. Fassbender, among our most cerebral movie stars, brings to his role almost none of the heat that so thrilled in Cary Fukunaga’s Jane Eyre (2011), opting instead for a restrained performance more than a little reminiscent of his android turn in Prometheus (2012). Blanchett, for her part, is exceptionally well-cast as a woman who dresses even household banalities in manufactured good cheer. An actress of significant technical ability and no charisma at all, Blanchett is a terrible choice if one needs the naturalistic candor of, say, Olivia Colman. Set against Fassbender’s icy elegance, however, the Australian is perfect, a figure of such polished unknowability that one can’t tell if she’s leaning in for a kiss or the kill.
Yet more important than casting is the use to which Soderbergh puts his characters. Here, the director is helped immensely by screenwriter David Koepp’s (Jurassic Park) ability to keep the action moving even as the players and themes acquire sharper definition. Case in point: a brilliant final-act sequence in which George polygraphs his one-time party guests with deftly intercut simultaneity. Not since George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez shared a ride in the trunk of a car has a Soderbergh scene so thrilled, amused, and surprised.
To be sure, Black Bag owes much to John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the 1974 “Karla” novel that has already received two superb screen adaptations of its own. Like that literary predecessor, Black Bag features an exhausted intelligence service that can no longer police its native hallways. As le Carré does, Koepp and Soderbergh line up five suspects and let a grimly competent mole-chaser knock them down. Where the new film departs from the aforementioned adaptations is in its utter commitment to snipping away any narrative fat. Masterful though they are, the two Tinker Tailor productions linger on the stage, with run times of 290 minutes (the Alec Guinness miniseries) and 127 minutes (the Gary Oldman film), respectively. Soderbergh’s picture, by contrast, is a sleek and nimble hour and a half. Not a moment of its 94 minutes is anything but strictly necessary.
As with both Tinker Tailors, I left Black Bag with more than a few questions about how, exactly, the wheels of the plot had fit together. Yet, I will happily keep thinking about the movie and can’t wait to see it again. Soderbergh’s latest is, after all, that rarest of things: a film for adults and one that treats the viewer with respect. If there is any justice, it will make a billion dollars but not — Hollywood, listen up — spawn any sequels. We have more than enough of those already.
Graham Hillard is editor at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal and a Washington Examiner magazine contributing writer.