Familiarity breeds contempt, maybe especially in marriages. How do you keep a close partnership fresh? Perhaps married spies, like the ones in Steven Soderbergh’s silky spy caper Black Bag, have the answer.
George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender), an experienced operative at Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre, receives a list of five colleagues who are suspected of being moles, capable of activating a cyberworm designed to wreak nuclear havoc. No problem there—except his wife, fellow high-level spy Kathryn St. Jean (Cate Blanchett), to whom he’s devoted, is on the list. The trust between these two is unshakable; George isn’t too worried. His first move is to invite the other four suspects to the couple’s house for dinner, the better to ferret out the traitor. “Avoid the chana masala,” he casually informs his preternaturally self-possessed wife as she slips into a column of liquid charmeuse before the guests arrive. He’s dosed that particular dish with truth serum, the better to get tongues flapping around the dinner table.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]
The potential traitors—played by Tom Burke, Naomie Harris, Regé-Jean Page, and Marisa Abela—also happen to be two sets of couples. Because, as one of them laments, who else can a spy really date? But if the party, a chic gathering around a low-lit table in the couple’s Architectural Digest–ready London abode, yields some juicy cyberspy gossip—this is a crowd who will tell you what they really think of Edward Snowden—it doesn’t tell George much about what his wife might be up to. The two talk about their work at home, but only up to a point. Any question too delicate to answer is met with a two-word code intended, politely, to get the other to back off: “Black Bag.” And that’s the response George gets when he asks Kathryn about some troubling evidence he finds, post-party, while emptying the trash. (This is a spy-spouse who not only does all the cooking, but also all the tidying up.) Meanwhile, Kathryn purrs an invitation from the bedroom. George may be wild about her, but his trust in her is shaken.
Read more: Steven Soderbergh on Sex, Stripping, and Consent in Magic Mike’s Last Dance
The great thing about the way Soderbergh makes movies—generally swiftly, and for relatively few pennies—is that he seems to have a great deal of fun doing it. The result is that his pictures don’t feel fussy or over-serious. That’s Black Bag in a satin-gold nutshell. The script is by David Koepp (writer of the best Mission: Impossible, the 1996 Brian De Palma iteration), and it’s filled with shimmery red herrings and liberal lashings of phony-baloney techno-spy stuff. (One agent compliments the work of another with buttery superlatives: “It’s a very sexy piece of code.”) The picture is sultry and understated, almost like a Sade song in movie form, though in some ways that’s a liability. Black Bag is over before you feel you’ve really gotten a hold of it; maybe it’s more of an amuse-bouche rather than a whole meal.
But then, would you rather have a well-crafted little morsel served up on a perfect porcelain square, or a heaping plateful of mashed nonsense that bores you before you’ve even finished it? Black Bag succeeds on its chilly wit, and on the cool, nervy appeal of its two stars. Blanchett strides through the movie with lioness grace; Fassbender makes George’s robotic use of logic seem like an aphrodisiac. Like all married couples, George and Kathryn have their things, those little daily annoyances, the occasional doubt about what the other may be thinking, or doing, in their private hours. But in the clinch, they’re a united front. What God hath joined let no man put asunder. That goes for pesky little cyberworms too.
