Filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino, the Coen Brothers, Jordan Peele, Julia Ducournau, or David Lynch use genre to scramble genre—they empty it out, undermine it, celebrate it, and reassemble it. Steven Soderbergh’s a more straightforward filmmaker. When he makes a genre movie, it’s a genre movie, and hits every genre beat with as much enthusiasm and panache as he can muster.
That doesn’t mean his films are bad or unintelligent. On the contrary, as his most recent film, the spy genre exercise Black Bag demonstrates, you need to understand how the engine works to make it run smoothly even if you aren’t interested in taking it apart.
Soderbergh signals his stylish knowingness in the very beginning, where cyber security agent George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) walks into a pub for a clandestine meeting. The scene’s shot from behind George; you follow the back of his head at eye level, forcing you to try to look around to orient yourself and try to pick out who and what is important. You become an investigator like him, seeking clues and knowledge, even as his face is occluded, so that one of the things you are trying to discover is George himself.
What George and you find out together is that (in the tradition of John Le Carré), there’s a mole in the department. More, that mole may be George’s wife, Kathryn (Cate Blanchett.) At stake is something mysterious which may lead to the death of tens of thousands of civilians. George attempts to identify other suspects at a cat-and-mouse dinner party; he also surveils his wife.
The exact details of what’s discovered are less important than the fact that there are a steady stream of discoveries to make—both in regards to the twisty narrative, and in regard to the personal quirks and backgrounds of our protagonists and their colleagues. It’s no accident that one of the suspects and main characters, Zoe Vaughan (Naomie Harris) is a therapist who conducts sessions with several co-workers. Nor is it coincidental that there’s a thoroughly unnecessary lie detector scene. The spies and the viewers both want to ferret out the truth. Much of the fun of watching the movie is watching the movie reveal itself.
Various characters point out that Kathryn and George care only about each other. That’s presented as both a weakness and a strength diegetically. But it’s also exactly how the movie dynamics work for the viewer, who’s primarily there to see the big name stars do their big name star thing, projecting intensity, sexiness, and competence.
At one point, George declares his devotion to his wife while spying on her with video surveillance; the woman helping him, Clarissa (Marisa Abela) spontaneously declares, “That’s so hot!” She’s the audience stand-in; like you she’s watching George watching Kathryn, and like you she’s swept away by their awesomeness. Soderbergh is telling you he loves these genre tropes and these characters, and that he wants you to love them too.
Le Carré wanted to say something about the ugliness, the shabbiness, and the dehumanization of the Cold War and of espionage. Soderbergh’s having too much fun to leave you with such a bleak moral. The plots and counterplots ultimately erase themselves in a giddy, staged spectacle of explication and explanation. “I haven’t had this much fun in years,” Kathryn quips, and again that’s a cue for the viewers. If you’re looking for profundity, innovation or ambition, this isn’t the right movie for you. But if you like sneaky spy dramas performed with enthusiasm and panache by everyone involved, you can’t do better than Black Bag.