BLACK BAG. Decades ago, I read a story in which a couple was described as having a “daunting conjugal bond.” It has since been the only scale by which my husband and I, mostly joking, measure our relationship. Are we, different though we are, seamlessly united against everyone at this table, in this restaurant? Is the adamantium shell of our total mutual acceptance impenetrable — if not unfathomable — to all others? And, heaven forbid, is another pair’s conjugal bond more daunting than ours? In this respect, at least, Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender are goals as married spies in director Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag. As is remarked upon in the film, they only seem to care about each other, which seems like a good thing all around until their mutual devotion is set against, say, the lives of tens of thousands of innocent people or delicately timed international espionage in service of ending a war or maintaining state secrets. Listen, marriage is about sacrifice and compromise.
With Black Bag, Soderbergh and his strong cast rife with talent pull off a spy thriller/mystery with heist elements up its sleeve and a love story secreted in the false bottom of its luggage. There are moments of high tension and dark comedy, between incendiary dinner party conversations, comparatively relaxed polygraph interrogations, paranoid meetings, inscrutable glances and cagey pillow talk. The plot and its players are sharp and controlled. But the cool of it all sacrifices some needed heat and while watching these people extricate themselves from traps is intriguing, there’s little about our protagonists to charm us or invest us in their survival.
George Woodhouse (Fassbender) and Kathryn St. Jean (Blanchett) are excellent spies who work for British intelligence, keeping their respective “black bag” secrets from one another as a matter of course. The are also possibly the worst dinner hosts ever. When George receives a list of possible traitors who might have stolen a potentially catastrophic program, which includes his wife’s name, the couple hosts the suspects, two other couples from work, for dinner. Young Clarissa (Marisa Abela) and hard-living Freddie (Tom Burke) are also intelligence officers, as is James (Regé-Jean Page), who’s seeing agency psychiatrist Zoe (Naomie Harris). Along with a nice red, George and Kathryn serve a drugged chickpea dish to loosen tongues and parlor games designed to ratchet up the hostility. (They might have just gone with an extra couple bottles, given how messy and loose-lipped the crew gets after a few drinks and how troubled all their relationships are.) Trees shaken, George investigates each new clue and vulnerability, including those that point to Kathryn, who’s got quite a lot in her black bag of late.
Blown-out headlights, white skies and golden interiors simultaneously soften edges and blind us in pale glare that, like the jazzy transitions between scenes, recall the glamour and heist energy of Soderbergh’s Out of Sight (1998) and Ocean’s 11 (2001). These suit George and Kathryn well enough, coming off as they do like a posed couple in a 1970s British cigarette ad.
Except George is exceptionally uncool and, while admired for his skills, weird and robotic. He is a photo negative of a movie spy: cerebral, charmless and terminally monogamous. Fassbender’s face, carefully stony most of the time, gets a lot out of the slightest flinch or tremor, but beyond his devotion to his wife, there isn’t much to like. (Perhaps this is realistic; a friend in the foreign service once told me that spies, real ones who observed and reported, were by necessity largely socially awkward, unattractive and forgettable people you wouldn’t linger with.) Likewise, one wonders whether we’d care if it were anyone but Blanchett sailing around in anything but her enviable parade of coats and tall boots. We watch their exchanges in hope of puzzling out who’s hiding what, but the stakes — aside from the aforementioned mass deaths hanging in the balance — feel strangely low.
George says he doesn’t like liars. Katherine says she values loyalty. How does this work for a pair of professional spies? It’s the question asked again and again, even as everyone is scrambling to discover a murderous traitor in their midst. Soderbergh creates a pleasing puzzle of both mysteries and withholds anything much steamier than a declaration of devotion. Black Bag is entertaining and engaging, slow moving as it is in places, but like everyone else in the film, George and Kathryn keep us at a distance, out of range of knowing or caring too deeply about them. After all, theirs is a daunting bond and we are outsiders. R. 93M. BROADWAY, MILL CREEK, MINOR.
Jennifer Fumiko Cahill (she/her) is the arts and features editor at the Journal. Reach her at (707) 442-1400, extension 320, or jennifer@northcoastjournal.com. Follow her on Bluesky @jfumikocahill.bsky.social.
NOW PLAYING
THE ALTO KNIGHTS. Robert DeNiro doubles up as rival mob bosses Vito Genovese and Frank Costello. R. 120M. BROADWAY, MILL CREEK.
ASH. A space traveler (Eliza González) awakens on a strange planet with no memories, a dead crew, alien life forms and Aaron Paul. R. 95M. BROADWAY.
CAPTAIN AMERICA: BRAVE NEW WORLD. Anthony Mackie wields the shield as the new president (Harrison Ford) hulks out. At least it’s not Nazis! PG13. 118M. BROADWAY, MILL CREEK.
THE DAY THE EARTH BLEW UP: A LOONEY TOONS MOVIE. It’s Porky and Daffy vs. the aliens and honestly that’s still better than our current leadership. PG. 91M. BROADWAY, MILL CREEK.
DOG MAN. Animated adventure starring a surgically spliced canine/human in pursuit of a villainous cat. Unclear if ACAB includes him. PG. 89M. MILL CREEK.
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THE MONKEY. Osgood Perkins directs the darkly comic Stephen King horror about twin brothers haunted by a homicidal wind-up toy. R. 98M. BROADWAY.
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SNOW WHITE. Live-action Disney musical. Don’t take any poisoned apples. PG. 109M. BROADWAY, MILL CREEK, MINOR.
For showtimes call: Broadway Cinema (707) 443-3456; Mill Creek Cinema 839-3456; Minor Theatre (707) 822-3456.
This article appears in Youngest North Coast Condor Dies of Lead Poisoning.
