Photo © Focus Features, Universal Pictures
Michael Fassbender in Black Bag
Michael Fassbender in Black Bag
Long tracking shots have become director Steven Soderbergh’s trademark. As Black Bag opens, the camera trails George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) along a labyrinth of hotel corridors and across the lobby to the closed doors of a private party. He asks the doormen for Meacham, and when admitted, the camera follows into the barroom and scoots after him downstairs to a louder, more private club where the mysterious Meacham holds court with two women in a corner booth.
With the camera still tracking, George follows Meacham (Gustaf Skarsgård) outside where Meacham gives George his mission: Severus is missing. One of five secret agents is the traitor and one of them might be your wife. Identify the mole—you have one week for many thousands will die.
Black Bag is a psychological thriller costarring Fassbender and Cate Blanchett as his wife. Both are British agents, masters of duplicity, who have reached the high clearance echelon of their country’s secret service. George must reckon with the distinct possibility that his wife is duping him by selling Severus to foreign operators. The clues come together like pieces of a puzzle, but the puzzle is three-dimensional in complexity. Who is else is playing the game—and why?
Severus is the MacGuffin of the story, written with a sly, skillful hand by David Koepp, a Steven Spielberg veteran who collaborated on Soderbergh’s recent supernatural film, Presence. Unlike so many sloppy Hollywood or indie films, Black Bag doesn’t waste a moment over its barely hour-and-a-half run. What is Severus? When George asks, Kathryn answers only that Severus was a Roman emperor whose overthrow triggered civil war, a clue to the geopolitical brinkmanship behind unleashing a weapon more insidious than an atom bomb for its ability to worm unseen into its target.
The psychology of Black Bag’s key players is more important to the story than the definition of Severus. George and Kathryn face their world with Sphinx-like imperturbability. An erotic tension holds them together—and maybe something more. The other four suspects are a mixed lot. Freddie (Tom Burke), Clarissa (Marisa Abela), Zoe (Naomie Harris) and James (Rége-Jean Page) are united only by their suspicion of each other and humanity as a whole and their desire to rise within a kingdom of falsehood. At least some of them wouldn’t flinch from pulling the trigger on their closest friends. The overseer of this surveillance state within a state, Steiglitz (Pierce Brosnan), is a shrewd master playing from multiple decks of cards.
The moral twilight of all parties is mirrored by the cinematography. Soderbergh sets many scenes at night or in rooms papered in shadows. With its smooth, hard surfaces and every object in place, George and Kathryn’s townhouse is a coldly elegant reflection of its owners. The agency where they work is headquartered in a glass building whose windows offer no transparency and admit only grey light. Will the religious convictions of one of the five suspects bring ethical consideration into the scheming? Will the primal bond of marriage prevent George and Kathryn from betraying each other in the name of … their country or their own ambition? The suspense grows as the plot twists tighter.
