Can we agree that Steven Soderbergh is one of America’s most exciting, influential, and innovative filmmakers currently working? Or, are his movies not “sexy” enough to elevate him to the ranks of artists like Hitchcock, Scorsese, Godard, and Truffaut? Actually, I don’t really care if we agree, I’m calling it. Since 1989’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Soderbergh has not only helped revolutionize independent film in the United States, but has consistently found ways to move cinema into blazingly original spaces of storytelling and technical innovation while remaining so prolific that it remains to be seen if he ever actually sleeps.
Somehow making it look effortless, Soderbergh bounces between glossy Hollywood crowd-pleasers like the Ocean’s trilogy and Erin Brokovich, experimental arthouse oddities like Bubble, Schizopolis, and The Girlfriend Experience, and intense, clinical deconstructions of bureaucracy like Traffic and Contagion. My personal favorite of his sub-genres? His off-key character studies The Limey, Che, and Solaris.
With his second release in just three months (after the flawed, yet mesmerizing ghost story Presence), Soderbergh’s Black Bag isn’t just a return to form for the formally restless auteur, but is inarguably the finest spy thriller since 2011’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by Tomas Alfredson. Hollywood espionage movies have been mostly concerned with car chases and explosions as of late, so consider me refreshed that Black Bag would rather spend its brisk runtime on crackling dialogue, magnetic performances, and high stakes battles of wits.
British intelligence officer George Woodhouse (a tightly coiled Michael Fassbender) is given a list of five other British agents, one of whom leaked a software program MacGuffin known as Severus to the bad guys. Woodhouse has one week to investigate the five agents and discover the mole before thousands might die. The twist? One of the agents is his beloved wife Kathryn St. Jean (Cate Blanchett, having the time of her life in this role).
That’s not a spoiler as we learn that she’s one of the suspects in the opening minutes, but I won’t go into the plot more than that since letting the slow burn of Black Bag unfurl in real time before you is a blissfully entertaining experience. When audiences complain about Hollywood not making films for “adults” anymore, I imagine them picturing something with the complexity and intelligence of Black Bag.
Soderbergh directs, edits, and shoots the film with such restless grace that it’s overwhelming to contemplate balancing such different artistic mediums simultaneously. He is one of the few directors alive talented enough to edit scenes in his head while building shot compositions and lighting a frame. Editing while filming might sound intuitive, but tightrope walking between cinematic disciplines on a $50 million studio picture requires a level of confidence I cannot even fathom.
This elevated level of filmmaking combined with an intelligent and fun script from David (Jurassic Park) Koepp, a playfully propulsive, percussive score from David (Ocean’s 11) Holmes, and a flawless supporting cast featuring a murderer’s row of future movie stars like Marisa Abela, Tom Burke, Naomie Harris, Regé-Jean Page, and Gustaf Skarsgård makes Black Bag a compulsively watchable modern classic.
On the surface, this sounds like something goofily convoluted like the Bradd Pitt-Angelina Jolie of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, but the film takes itself quite seriously. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t fun. Fassbender and Blanchett are such #couplegoals that reveling in the multiple levels of their devotion to each other is not just sexy and sweet, but refreshingly uncynical for a spy thriller. As intensely high stakes as the Severus mystery is, Black Bag is so ambitiously constructed that it works equally well as an achingly romantic love story.
Soderbergh has spent decades delighting in showing us good-looking people being incredible at their jobs, whether it’s as lawyers, prostitutes, thieves, astronauts, strippers, revolutionaries, or spies. He rarely ever approaches a story “normally,” instead coming in at singular and eccentric angles that make his audience re-examine their own preconceptions. Black Bag is so effortless, so elegant, that I want another five movies starring Woodhouse and St. Jean, but only with Soderbergh driving. Accept no substitutes.
Grade: A-
