What The Hell America!

Steven Soderbergh’s spy film Black Bag, currently in theaters, has come out just a few months after his ghost film Presence, making one wonder when the director actually sleeps.

Black Bag is by far the bigger hit with the critics though, getting glowing reviews from all over even as it tanks badly at the box-office.

I’m with The People. Nothing to see here that you couldn’t appreciate just as much when it’s streaming on television, if you’re so inclined.

But the glowing reviews seem to indicate that this slick little film is some sort of dream of cinematic sophistication. I don’t see it.

Soderbergh is gifted, obviously, as is his favorite screenwriting collaborator, David Koepp. But I watched Black Bag thinking, I wish these two would stop rushing willy-nilly through unambitious genre films and settle down to some more focused work. Like maybe an ambitious genre film. Because none of these hasty little movies are exactly setting the world on fire.

The way Koepp resolves the narratives of these minor efforts he knocks out at a record rate is almost invariably sloppy and unsatisfying — the ending of Black Bag is ludicrous. Though it does have a funny punchline, as if the whole movie were a joke leading up to the moment when Cate Blanchett tells a group of spies gathered around a dining room table, “And don’t any of you ever try to mess with my marriage again!”

Black Bag is a marital comedy-drama disguised as a spy film, and you can tell that by the way the climactic interludes are two dinner party scenes at the swanky home of a pair of posh married British intelligence agents, Kathryn and George Woodhouse (played by Blanchett and Michael Fassbender). The two are known for committing “flagrant monogamy” in a devoted way that all their colleagues find odd. Not because it’s the era of polyamory, but because everybody else lies and cheats so much, in a way that’s particularly enabled by their profession.

“Black bag” is the code phrase they all use to mean, “I can’t tell you, that’s classified info.” It comes in very handy when you want to deceive your significant other.

But Kathryn and George are absurdly well-suited, both so svelte and soigné and aesthetically suited to their lavish lifestyle, it becomes somewhat nauseating watching them. But it also makes clear why they’re together — they’re really a matched pair. Blanchett, still slender as a reed at age fifty-five, plays Kathryn as almost narcissistically pleased with herself, tossing a mane of waist-length hair around while changing from one glamorous outfit to the next, fully aware that her lean, ascetic husband is watching her obsessively as always. When she catches him at it, he apologizes, and she purrs, “I like it.”

Later, when he articulates the way their marriage works, he says he assumes she watches him just as assiduously. But we don’t see any such equal obsession on her part. It’s his declaration that he always puts her first, no matter what alarming secret plot she’s embroiled in, or whether any trouble she gets into is “of her own making” — he’d always go to her rescue.

Whether this attitude is mutual becomes the subject of the film when it looks as if Kathryn might be the mole who’s infiltrated the agency — and worse than that, whether she’s lying to George. Because, as George frequently says with steely seriousness, “I don’t like liars.”

George’s version of not liking liars takes extremist turns. It’s revealed, for example, that he once destroyed his secret agent father’s life and career by getting taped evidence of his routine infidelities and playing them at a family gathering.

The first dinner party is staged by him, over Kathryn’s mild and ironic objections about the likelihood of “a mess to clean up” afterward, is in order to push the four people he regards as the likeliest moles into injudicious speech. He laces one of the dishes with an inhibition-lowering drug to aid in his investigation, after warning Kathryn not to touch it.

The four are fellow agent Freddie (Tom Burke); Freddie’s much younger girlfriend and agency satellite specialist, Clarissa (Marisa Abela); agency psychiatrist Zoe (Naomie Harris), and her boyfriend James (Regé-Jean Page), another agent who’s noted for his competitive desire to rise in the agency. George gets the hostilities started among them by playing a “game” in which each person declares a resolution, as if on New Year’s Eve, only the resolution is for the person sitting to the right.

This gives Clarissa a chance to tell cheating boyfriend Freddie to “give her up,” meaning the other woman he’s been seeing. In his passionate denials, Freddie segues into an ugly monologue about how boring he finds Clarissa’s neediness and groundless paranoia.

George then helps things along by revealing the hotel and the room number where Freddie is, in fact, meeting another woman regularly.

The thing is, not only is it easy for spies to cheat and lie, it’s also easy for spies to find out the truth about other spies’ actual behavior. This is where the film’s narrative gets a bit sloppy. Because when there’s all sorts of easy-to-spot evidence for errant behavior, and all sorts of stupidly obvious things that spies presumably wouldn’t fall for but, in this movie, they do, it gets confusing.

Sometimes, when it’s necessary for the complex plot to work out, the stupid thing is indeed a deliberately planted fake. But other times, again when the complex plot requires it in order to work out, it’s just a case of straight-up spy stupidity.

Anyway, it comes down to the story of how George comes to suspect Kathryn of lying to him and starts tracking her movements, presumably hoping she’s not going to turn out to be the mole but having to know regardless. After all, his boss, played by Pierce Brosnan, has specifically tasked him with this vital investigation. If Kathryn is the mole, will George rescue her out of his usual voyeuristic devotion, or will he take revenge because “I don’t like liars”?

It’s really not a very tense situation, because it seems pretty clear throughout how this will go. In fact, the relative lack of tension becomes obvious when one scene in the film suddenly starts crackling with disturbing charges, and it has little to do with George and Kathryn’s relationship. The scene involves agency psychiatrist Zoe and her session with Kathryn, who’s required to attend a certain number of them and is doing so under agency duress. Her contempt for Zoe’s trade is made sneeringly clear when she’s just as able to read Zoe’s “issues” as Zoe is to read hers — two different kinds of “spying” facing off against each other.

Blanchett and Harris are so good in the scene together, I was sorry there was no tricky plot development that would allow them to face off in several more scenes. If their characters had started having an affair — a very messy one, to counter all that smug George-and-Kathryn sleekness — that would’ve heated up this altogether too cool film considerably.