Film Review: Black Bag

Spy films are all about the tropes. Suave men. Beautiful women. Quippy dialogue. A good espionage flick, should make you want to ditch the jeans for your sharpest suit. A great one though makes you question that impulse and Black Bag is strictly the latter.

George (Michael Fassbender) is the anti-Bond. He’s happily married, likes to fish and is such a pedant that when he gets a smudge of wine on his white shirt, he goes upstairs to change his whole outfit. At another time, an attractive young agent (Marisa Abela) attempts to flirt with him and he stares at her coldly until she blushes and apologises.

So, it makes for a bad day when we discover early on there are five potential traitors in his un-named spy organisation and one of them is his wife. He’s got a week to find out who it is and thousands of lives are on the line.

So far, so spy. You can probably write the remainder of the film in your head. Lies. Action. Cross and double-cross. Explosive finale. However, that’s only part of the story because while writer David Koepp does transcribe a compelling spy thriller he’s far more interested in the question – When you can lie about everything, how do you tell the truth about anything?

The film’s title comes from supposed spy-slang about anything you’re not allowed to talk about. Don’t want to explain why you can’t pick up your phone? Black bag. Got an incriminating hotel receipt on your credit card? Black bag.

This kind of power would be difficult to not abuse in the hands of regular folk, but spy organisations generally hire sociopaths. When calculating how many lives you’re willing to end for ‘the greater good,’ is part of the job you’re not going to get many moral absolutists sending in their CVs.  

Our cast of miscreants is kept relatively tight consisting primarily of George and his five suspects (Pierce Brosnan is solid in the few scenes he’s in as spy master Arthur Stieglitz). Prime suspect and wife, Kathryn (Cate Blanchett) moves with the kind of languid grace of a panther. She is impossibly stylish, elegant and witty. Her voice doesn’t rise, she doesn’t make threats and yet you know of the two she is the far more dangerous one.

If the Oscars were interested in performances that weren’t melodramatic wailing, I would say it was a potential award winner. Fassbender, to his credit, isn’t far behind. His George is a complex man, on one hand a devoted husband who ‘hates liars’ yet belongs to an industry that thrives on them. We’re left with little doubt that blackmail and murder are cards he’s willing to play yet there is an iron moral code all the same – it’s just his code. Such complexity is hard to pull off, but Fassbender does it with aplomb.

Unfortunately, this does mean the rest of the cast is playing for a very distant third. Freddie (Tom Burke), a loose-cannon alcoholic, manages to charm even when he’s being self-destructive. Clarissa (Marisa Abela) ‘sex-pot’ character provides a dose of youthful energy to the proceedings however despite her scenes being fun they seem to exist mostly for titillation. 

I felt confident ‘alpha’ agent James (Rege-Jean Page) and conflicted psychologist Dr Vaughan (Naomie Harris) were more middling, but still very competent. 

Soderberg, most famous for his ‘Ocean’ heist films, is in fine form. Black Bag is a tight, well-paced 90 minutes with cinematographer Peter Andrews close camera-work creating an intimate feel throughout. In particular I feel props should also go to costume designer Ellen Mirojnick. Wardrobe is easy to overlook in movies, but in Black Bag, Kathryn's flowing silk, the sharp, but neutral colours on George tell the story just as much as the writing. 

For myself, the one fly in the ointment is the ending. Ultimately, Black Bag, is a ‘whodunit’ in spy clothing and as any mystery aficionado will tell you, a good mystery should be solvable if you look closely enough at the clues. Unfortunately, the movie fails at this. In fact, it felt like Soderberg purposely rushes through the last ten minutes so audiences don’t have time to question how logic breaks down at the final hurdle. 

Which is a shame, but Black Bag, after all, is less interested in being a generic spy thriller and more about a love story in a world where it should be impossible. In that, it very much succeeds. 

Black Bag is showing at Broadway Cinema Nottingham.