Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett are impossibly glamorous as two spies in love.
PLOT: A British spy (Michael Fassbender), working for an MI5-like organization, is tasked with tracking down a traitor who has allegedly sold a device that could trigger a nuclear meltdown to a Russian dissident. Things are complicated when one of his chief suspects turns out to be his beloved wife (Cate Blanchett).
REVIEW: If you read Steven Soderbergh’s annual “Seen; Read” lists, you’ll note that among his diverse tastes in film, he has a particular fondness for spy movies – with the George Lazenby James Bond movie, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, long noted as one of his favourites. He’s been toying with doing a spy movie for years, with him and George Clooney having famously almost made their own version of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Now, Soderbergh finally gets his chance, his movie owes less to the cinematic world of 007 than his own, stylish Oceans’ Eleven, mixed with a healthy dose of sixties spy thrillers in the vein of The Ipcress File.
Black Bag takes an interesting approach in that it centers around a plot that could have been lifted from a Bond movie, where thousands of lives hang in the balance, but pulls it off with very little on-screen carnage. Fassbender’s George Woodhouse is a more cerebral spy in the mould of a John Le Carre character, sporting an impeccable wardrobe and Harry Palmer-esque glasses. His mastery of the spy game comes from his uncanny ability to take apart his foes and use their weaknesses to his advantage. Fassbender plays him as cold and calculating, with him utterly unwilling to display any sense of weakness. He’s fastidious about everything, including his wardrobe, with him at one point immediately changing out of a crisp dress shirt when the tiniest drop of wine winds up on one of his cuffs. Yet, he has a significant weakness of his own, being his all-consuming love for his wife, Kathryn (Cate Blanchett), who, like him, works in the highly classified “Black Bag” section, with her under Pierce Brosnan’s George Smiley-like character, Arthur Stieglitz.
In addition to his wife, Woodhouse’s suspects include Tom Burke’s hard-drinking Freddie – his best friend in the agency, as well as Freddie’s much younger mistress, Marisa Abel’s Clarissa, whose emotions make her something of a liability. Then there’s Regé-Jean Page as Stokes, a fast-rising agent who lacks a conscience, and his lover, Naomi Harris’s company shrink, Zoe, who has access to everyone’s secrets. The game here, as written by regular Soderbergh collaborator David Koepp, is for Woodhouse to figure out who the inside man (or woman) is.
It helps that Fassbender and Blanchett have great chemistry, and they are a dazzlingly-stylish couple, both of whom, by necessity, have become experts at keeping secrets from each other. Blanchett’s Kathryn runs a little hotter than George, with her more emotional, and suffering from a bit of burnout due to an op that went wrong, which is only lightly hinted at early in the film. Running a taut ninety minutes, Soderbergh’s crafted a twisty spy romp, although even though it centers around a truly Bond-like MacGuffin, the tone is kept playful, with the thrills being more character-based than anything else.
It’s driven along by a propulsive, jazzy score by Soderbergh regular David Holmes, and it amounts to one of the director’s more entertaining recent efforts. While his ghost thriller Presence might have been a bit too cerebral for most audiences, with Black Bag, he’s operating in a more mainstream mode. If you liked his Ocean’s Trilogy, you’ll likely get a big kick out his spy flick. Fassbender’s Woodhouse is such an interesting antihero that perhaps a return to his take on spycraft might not be out of the question were this Focus Features release to do well.
