“It’s that Brandy and Kanye song!”
That thought flashed in my head on the Lyft ride home after I saw Black Bag, this month’s Steven Soderbergh film, which is being marketed as a straight-faced Mr. and Mrs. Smith. But after viewing the movie, I realized it reminded me more of “Talk About Our Love,” the mid-Aughts jam in which the R&B princess and the then-not-batshit-crazy rapper assumed the roles of lovers who wade through the envy, jealousy and Haterade of their friends and neighbors. That’s really what Black Bag is about.
As top-tier agents in London’s National Cyber Security Centre, George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) and Kathryn St. Jean (Cate Blanchett) are a couple who don’t — or shall we say, can’t — bring their work home with them. (Pierce Brosnan, Remington 007 himself, plays their blustery boss.) When one or the other has to instantly attend to business, they lovingly tell their spouse the movie’s title, which is intelligence slang for “top secret.” (Since we’re talking about Soderbergh here, it could also be a reference to The Black Bag, a lost silent mystery from the 1920s about a detective who does some dirty shit to keep a thieving lady he’s fallen for out of jail.)
The couple’s marital bliss is tested when George receives a list of employees who are suspected of stealing a deadly cyber-worm MacGuffin — and Kathryn’s on it. Now, this makes Bag sound like another tale of superspies who deal with danger, paranoia and possible betrayal in both love and war. But once again, this is gotdamn Soderbergh we’re talking about here — the guy who’s always looking to put a fresh spin on a genre flick. And the spin for this one is it’s also a dramedy about fucked-up relationships. (Remember all those insufferable ensemble ’90s rom-coms that kept winning awards at Sundance? Kinda like that.)
The other suspects on George’s list are coworkers/dinner-date chums who are engaged in less-than-copacetic workplace relationships. Naomie Harris’ staff psychologist is having an inferior fling with Regé-Jean Page’s caddish, ambitious agent, while Tom Burke’s boozehound operative learns the hard way why he should never cheat on Marisa Abela’s high-strung tech wiz/audience surrogate.
Bag is both bitchy and big-headed — an opulent, fastidious mixture of John le Carré and Neil LaBute. Although he’s not averse to doing a straight-up actioner (like when he had Fassbender, Ewan McGregor and Channing Tatum go toe to toe with Gina Carano in that other globe-trotting spy thriller, Haywire), Soderbergh and veteran screenwriter David Koepp (whose CV includes the first Mission: Impossible movie and that Jack Ryan reboot Chris Pine did a decade ago) are more interested in shots that are given verbally.
Soderbergh and Koepp pile on dense dialogue to make it sound like smart, important shit is going down all the time. But it’s the moments when these secret-agent men and women get all catty, cruel and passive-aggressive with each other that turn this spy story into a surly soap opera. The most intense, suspenseful stuff happens when these couples are around a dinner table, knocking back glasses of wine, and revealing secrets that are more personal than government-related.
As always, Soderbergh — who also served as cinematographer and editor (don’t let that “Mary Ann Bernard” credit fool you!) — keeps things both lean and extra. Black Bag is a tight 93 minutes, but it’s still lacquered up with showroom swankiness. While the workplace scenes are visually drab and dire (Severance isn’t the only thing out here exposing the noxious, never-ending dread of office corridors), the rest is entertainingly bougie. Between the eye-catching locales and the yuppilicious work of production designer Philip Messina and costumer Ellen Mirojnick, Bag may be the first espionage thriller to make some viewers feel like dumb, broke, lonely muhfuckas. (I know a certain crowd might deem it “elitist.”)
Fassbender (studious, stylish and on the spectrum) and Blanchett (adding some witty sheen to her fierce-temptress-with-demons shtick) have a ball playing too-perfect agents in a too-perfect marriage. It’s like they’re doing parodies of the cold, calculating characters they’ve played oh so well in the past. When they’re in bed ready to get it on, it seems more like they’re performing. Even in a seductive spy flick, Soderbergh shows how the most sparkling of couplings still have to bullshit each other sometimes, just to keep the peace at home.
A spicy, sharp-dressed spy yarn in which more tea is spilled than blood, Black Bag shows that even lethal, married government agents have to duck the toxicity and remind each other that — as the wise star of Moesha once sang — they just want what we got.
