Black Bag
First screened and reviewed in March 2025
Director: Steven Soderbergh. Cast: Michael Fassbender, Cate Blanchett, Marisa Abela, Tom Burke, Naomie Harris, René-Jean Page, Pierce Brosnan, Gustaf Skarsgård, Kae Alexander, Alex Magliaro, Orli Shuka, Daniel Dow. Screenplay: David Koepp. In Brief:
Biggest twist is not a whodunit but an old-fashioned whydunit. Good curio value, but it's static, TV-ish, and too short.
VOR:②
Soderbergh's productivity and versatility are themselves more interesting than his last decade of individual films. Same goes here.
The most interesting part of a lot of Soderbergh movies is trying to imagine the questions he's posing to himself at the easel before he starts to paint. Can I make a 125-minute spy thriller in just 90? Can I sell married spies in impossibly glamorous clothes, in a world that has more and more reason to mistrust spies and government ops? Can I serve a script that's a "Christie by way of Le Carré" thriller where nobody will guess that the greatest secret and greatest allegiance is X, because nobody seems much to believe in X anymore, at least at the movies, or at least in this genre? Can I make a movie where "the Russia-Ukraine war" is the clearly signaled context without really touching the Russia-Ukraine war?
Those are all interesting enough questions, save maybe the last one, and they place Black Bag on the right side of Soderbergh's fast-fashion gimcracks. The ideas don't die an unkind death, as in The Laundromat or Unsane, or just sit there the way Side Effects did. But I didn't really believe this movie? As in, I could not imagine a plausible scene of a single one of these character being alive, doing their job, doing their thing, outside the scenes that have been scripted for them. There's a plot here but too little story, a setting but no world, people but no characters (or maybe characters but no people?).
The mercilessly streamlined editing compounds that problem of Black Bag seeming like a piece of autonomous, lightly experimental engineering, not what I think of as a piece of art. Yes, we all want movies to be shorter, but there's such a thing as too short, too clipped... which is to say, I'm starting to get as bored with "Mary Ann Bernard" as I am with "Peter Andrews," returning once again to his blown-out light sources and to his favorite color, fluorescent jaundice.
Costume designer Ellen Mirojnick brings a lot more personality to the two leads than the script does or, I'm sad to say, than Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett do. I'm not sensing a lot of fire or hunger from Fassbender since he abruptly returned from his abrupt dormancy around 2017, which completely accidentally coincided with #MeToo's arrival in Hollywood and I certainly never wonder about that, ever. Blanchett, much as I love her, may be too much like Soderbergh to be great in his movies: they're both in their heads a lot, they're both willing to try anything, but their cerebral, let's-test-this-out sides don't always leave a ton of room for the audience. There's a strong sense they're making work for themselves a lot of the time, not for us. To be honest, I kind of admire that, except when I recall how often they've both made movies that richly, thrillingly side-stepped that either/or: movies that were for everybody, across a range of genres, from Middle Earth to Depression-era Missouri. I want Soderbergh and Blanchett to keep testing and discovering, and while they gratify themselves by doing that, I think I'll go home where Erin Brockovich and Ocean's Eleven and Carol are always waiting. Grade:B–
