‘Black Bag' review: Workplace romance goes rogue in a witty spy game starring Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett

What's a dinner party among spies really like? Is even the smallest of small talk fraught with deception? Does anyone dare mutter a single un-strategic comment about the food?
Not once but twice, as strategic bookends, director Steven Soderbergh's sleek, droll guessing game 'Black Bag' drops us into an intimate gathering at an elegant London townhouse. Around the dining room table are six coworkers, employed by the British intelligence agency MI6. The hosts, George and Kathryn, have their reasons for this dinner event, though it's George's show tonight. He's the one who adds a smidgen of some sort of truth drug to his chickpea curry recipe in order to learn what he needs to know.
What he needs to know is the thing on which writer David Koepp's plot depends. A mole within the agency has slipped a top-secret cyber worm, code name Severus, to the Russians. It's a potential geopolitical nightmare. Who's the mole? Is it Zoe (Naomi Harris), the coolly observant agency psychiatrist whose lover is intelligence agent James (Regé-Jean Page)?
Or is it agent Clarissa (Marisa Abela), who appears to be a little sweet on George, while currently sleeping with another suspect on George's list, the brash, sloppy Freddie (Tom Burke)? No one's immune from suspicion, not even Kathryn, who has a way of smiling and purring through her answers to anyone's questions. She and George seem a little too perfect for each other. Their 'flagrant monogamy,' as one character characterizes their marriage, sets the house of Woodhouse apart from the riskier sex lives of their cohorts.
From there, 'Black Bag' follows George as he follows Kathryn's whereabouts, remotely, as she conducts what appears to be a routine assignment in Switzerland. He's doing double duty, keeping an eye on her safety as well as her potential culpability. And in Fassbender and Blanchett, director Soderbergh benefits from a choice pair of sphinxes.
Unfolding over a few days, the cat-and-mouse intrigue of 'Black Bag' sustains a dense but adroit comedy of workplace manners. It's also a performance lesson in the art of the conceal, as opposed to the reveal, and Koepp takes care to delineate everyone's smarts in different ways. A standout scene, as written, filmed and acted, pits psychiatrist Zoe against agent James, with Harris, enmeshed professionally and personally, matching wits with Page in every terse exchange.
Shooting digitally — Soderbergh was an early digital convert, and once again serves as his own cinematographer and editor — the director favors a slightly queasy clinical quality in his lighting when a scene's uneasiness calls for it. In the psychiatric evaluation sequence, the light outside Zoe's office window makes it a bit hard, on purpose, to fully discern the faces in the foreground two-way interrogation. We squint a little, watching two characters narrowing their own eyes, wondering if they're hearing anything close to the truth.
There are times in 'Black Bag,' its title invoked whenever somebody can't or won't talk about something because it's confidential, when Fassbender's restraint feels rote, verging on not-entirely-human. (You wouldn't be surprised if George turned out to be the android Fassbender played in his two 'Alien' movies.) As always, the actor's work holds the screen, in its precise and unblinking focus. At the same time he's giving what might be called a turtleneck performance; in the role of an emotional cipher, but a hunky one, Fassbender has a way of letting the clothes, in this case a dashing turtleneck sweater, do the heavy lifting.
There's not much violence in 'Black Bag,' the result being it matters more. In their three projects together — this one preceded by the crafty, minimalist ghost story 'Presence' and the terrific, COVID-lockdown 'Rear Window' riff 'KIMI' — Koepp and Soderbergh mine their genres in their own eccentric ways. Soderbergh has had his share of hits across the decades (he and Koepp are now in their early 60s), but more and more he has less and less interest in delivering what audiences have come to expect from a contemporary spy thriller. You know. Noise. Bombast. Disposable, anonymous, soulless, jokey slaughter. 'The Gray Man,' in other words.
'Black Bag' may be modest, and frivolous, but it's sharp-witted. Every performance feels right, with several Bond alums coming and going, including Pierce Brosnan as the imperious agency director. The movie's vibe stays closer to the murmured intrigue of John le Carré than to the schoolboy fantasies of Ian Fleming. Fassbender's George Woodhouse suggests George Smiley, the spymaster of 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy' and others, if Smiley took an obsessive interest in his wardrobe and borrowed big black specs from Michael Caine's Harry Palmer movies.
If anything, 'Black Bag' is too short; it gets the whole job done in a tick under 90 minutes, not counting end credits. Another 15 or 20 minutes might've fleshed out the elliptical marriage at the well-hidden heart of the story.
On the other hand: When was the last time you saw a movie, spy-driven or otherwise, and thought it felt 15 minutes too short?
'Black Bag' — 3.5 stars (out of 4)
How to watch: Premieres in theaters March 14

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