It’s debatable whether Steven Soderbergh is one of the greatest directors working today, but he’s eclipsed his contemporaries when it comes to the quantity of his output. Despite his initial proclamation that he’d retired upon the release of the medical thriller Side Effects in 2013, Soderbergh went on to revolutionize the industry’s distribution process. After the independent distribution of his self-financed heist comedy Logan Lucky, Soderbergh sold his subsequent films High Flying Bird, The Laundromat, Let Them All Talk, and Kimi to streaming services. In between his work as a producer on various prestige television shows, Soderbergh also returned to cap off his Magic Mike trilogy and helmed the indie horror thriller Presence.
Soderbergh’s less of a workaholic than a director fascinated by process; while the last decade of his career hasn’t produced a classic like Out of Sight, Ocean’s Eleven, or Erin Brockovich, each of his post-retirement films has unraveled the minutiae of a specific industry, profession, or postmodern theory. Even with scripts that were strictly functional, Soderbergh was able to turn Magic Mike’s Last Dance into a study of the post-pandemic male loneliness epidemic, and used his quasi-Vertigo remake Kimi to explore the era-specific horror of being a woman on the Internet.
Soderbergh’s latest film Black Bag is equipped with a more seasoned hand behind the script; the espionage thriller was written by David Koepp, whose credits include 1990s hits such as Mission: Impossible, Independence Day, Jurassic Park, and Death Becomes Her. It also takes place in a world familiar to Soderbergh, as he’s spun tales of spies and infrastructural espionage in The Limey, Haywire, Traffic, and The Informant! Yet, Black Bag isn’t a retread, as the fact that it is centered on spies is merely table setting; it’s a study of the lies, double-crosses, and willful ignorance involved in relationships.
Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett star as the married couple George and Kathryn Woodhouse, who both work for the National Cyber Security Center, led by the tough-minded director Arthur Stieglitz (Pierce Brosnan). George is informed that there’s a leak of classified information that could result in blowback against the agency, and is helmed with the investigation of a potential mole. George’s suspects include the charismatic veteran Colonel James Stokes (Rege-Jean Page) and his psychiatrist girlfriend Dr. Zoe Vaughn (Naomie Harris), as well as the womanizing field agent Freddie Smalls (Tom Burke) and his enigmatic girlfriend Clarissa (Marisa Abela). George’s profession makes him privy to details about his accomplices' private lives, but his task is more challenging after Kathryn is named as a suspect.
Black Bag is a film without fat; there are no expositional passages dedicated to the history of the NCSC, no action sequences intended to introduce characters, or needless red herrings meant to divert attention. The only reason that Black Bag is a film about spies is that it offered the best excuse for Soderbergh to explore the ways in which information is ascertained, and how business and ethics are compromised when friends are also co-workers. Despite a few clever uses of cell phone communication and drone deployment, Black Bag is closer to an Old Hollywood chamber piece than a James Bond movie; if the classical homages weren’t apparent enough, Soderbergh managed to sneak in a knowing reference to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
The benefit of a film about professionals that’ve learned to mask their emotions is that Black Bag has no interest in the melodrama that’s so often found in marital dramas. Given that its six main characters lie as part of their professional duties, they’re able to avoid desperate attempts to earn the viewers’ empathy that would simply string out scenes without the addition of new information. That’s not to say that Black Bag isn’t emotional; there are more than a few gut-punches, but they come from the shock that the film was able to hide its twists.
Even if Soderbergh has offered the attention-to-detail that’s absent among this generation’s top blockbuster filmmakers, he still has an interest in the appeal of movie stars. Fassbender has played charming before, but the notes of internalized conflict masked by undeniable charisma within George are reminiscent of Steven McQueen or Yul Brynner. Blanchett has a greater challenge, as Kathryn is simultaneously the most socially inviting character in the film, but also the most emotionally unreadable. Within a film that began in media res, Fassbender and Blanchett alluded to an entire backstory for these two characters that’s never explicitly called out.
Casting is also an efficient way for Soderbergh to convey ideas; casting Bridgerton’s smoldering star Page as the film’s unpredictable bad boy is smart, as is the use of Brosnan as an experienced field agent that could’ve been 007 in a lifetime prior. If Harris has the professionalism needed to play a believable medical expert, Soderbergh’s also able to take a bet that Burke and Abela will attain a comparable level of stardom within the next few years. Abela has a defiant personality drawn from her terrific work on Industry, and Burke’s dry sensibilities reflect the fact that the Furiosa and The Souvenir star is one of the industry’s most underrated actors.
The sharp dialogue provided by Koepp may have suggested that Black Bag wasn’t a performance-heavy film, but it contains better acting than a majority of the films up for Best Picture last year. Each of the stars has to give an unreadable performance that could point to a variety of motivations, yet still feel authentic when the truth is unearthed. Despite the mercifully short running time of 94 minutes, Black Bag is reliant on its dialogue, which is frequently technical. Koepp’s script is streamlined so that it never feels like jargon, and the ensemble is capable of deliveries that suggest a comprehension of the dialogue, and not simply a recitation. Perhaps the fact that Black Bag is unambiguously a film for adults will feel like a novelty in a world where shallow Netflix action-comedies are the only reprieve from franchise filmmaking, but it's not Soderbergh’s fault for the expectation that the audience deserves better.