In the Flesh: Black Bag

Black Bag is gorgeous. Its forced-perspective long shots of sterile, barren offices and exquisite modern dining rooms are a feast, its palette of gentle golds, browns, creams, and grays so obviously chosen with the same meticulous attention to detail with which the film’s protagonists, married couple George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) and Kathryn St. Jean (Cate Blanchett), conduct themselves in their work with MI6. Fassbender is soft-spoken and methodical in the role, a kind of polite middle-class Terminator, while Blanchett plays a little wilder, leaning into her rangy physique and naturally leonine features. The two have an effortlessly collegiate feel to them as they preside over dinner with their younger underlings and maneuver the complex web of their workplace. Where the film could stand to cut loose is in the invocation of the heat the script needs to exist between the couple. There are a few great moments. The 360-rule-breaking close-ups when George affirms he would kill for Kathryn really does crackle, and Blanchett’s delivery of the line “scratch my back” feels practically molten. But the film is holding itself back at every turn, keeping sexuality largely partitioned off in deed if not in word in what is clearly an intentional directorial choice.

In spite of this odd decision, intended to show us the ways in which these characters are forced to live ruthlessly compartmentalized lives, Black Bag maintains consistent momentum and charge. It shows us a mystery and then picks it apart with rigor and speed, driven by a series of wonderfully quick conversations. The flirtatious, frustrated Clarissa (Marisa Abela), the immature and emotionally blocked Colonel James Stokes (Regé-Jean Page), the cautious Dr. Zoe Vaughan (Naomie Harris); Soderbergh has assembled a near-perfect supporting cast and turned them loose on excellent dialogue. The script is admirably dense with industry jargon and acronyms, lending proceedings in the office a feeling of authenticity, but not so intimidating as to prevent the average viewer from following along via context clues. The invasive and circular polygraph sequence is a particular delight, cut into rapidly switching segments by character as is de rigueur for this stuff but so compelling one can forgive the lack of originality.

The other star here is David Holmes’ score, which ranges from spiky synth to deep, smokily intimate strings and percussion, never just mirroring the emotional inflection of a scene but deepening and complicating it, imparting something absent from the composition. It’s refreshing to see an artist take a calculated risk like this and succeed In a creatively conservative genre like the spy thriller. Perhaps the only thing about Black Bag that outright doesn’t work is the cheekily obvious metaphor of George’s fishing, which ironically suffers from impatient pacing. Slow it down, bring the mood somewhere darker, and it might have made the desired impact, but as it stands it feels both perfunctory and overly blunt. Still, if the worst that can be said of your film is that the fishing scenes were a little rushed, I think you can rest easy.