Just because you have two great actors, Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett in the same (lame) frame and the name Steven Soderbergh as director, it doesn’t follow that the end product ends up being a tour de force.
With its over-punctuated writing (the mighty David Koepp, no less) self consciously dark lighting and a tendency to shoot the characters in their collective foot, Black Bag is every bit the espionage drama you would expect from Soderbergh who has had a very uneven career, from the sheer brilliance of Erin Brockovich and Traffic to the wasted opportunities of Full Frontal and The Laundromat.
Black Bag is not as questionably positioned in Soderbergh’s career as Laundromat (where Meryl Streep was criminally wasted in an inane plot). It is more refined in tone, stronger in structure and assuredly far less adrift.
But it still fails to justify the presence of the stalwart actors, favouring an ongoing silliness that runs across this James Bond with brains (but alas, no balls).
Michael Fassbender, who is determined to prove his versatility, no matter what it takes, is again unrecognizable as George Woodhouse, a snarling stoic British Intelligence officer with a wife Katherine (Cate Blanchett) who is suspected of leaking confidential information to the country’s enemies.
Rather than work towards clearing his wife’s name from charges of insubordination, as any normal husband would do, George seems to enjoy the idea of Kathryn being accused of sedation. He follows her movements, with dismaying obviousness, I might add.
The two play spies like spies, silhouetted shadowy and somewhat sinister. I really couldn’t figure out if Fassbender and Blanchett, great actors that they are, even like one another, as actors or characters. There is this unintentionally funny moment when Michael finds a movie ticket in the trashcan. But Kathryn denies having gone for a movie. This is meant to be conclusive evidence against Kathryn!!!
This is the cocky version of a Hitchcock mystery, with neither the intrigue nor the elegance of the master. The storytelling, leaden with dark shadows, leans towards an idle fuzzy suspense which is meant to trigger a curiosity in us. But the effect is the opposite: we wonder how these self important clumsy characters could be entrusted such make-or-break, do-or-die, positions of responsibility.
In one dinnertable sequence a couple quarrel viciously while the rest of the “intelligence” officers (revealing a conspicuous absence of common intelligence) look on nonchalantly. The heated altercation ends with the woman stabbing the man’s hand with a dinner knife before we could exclaim, ‘What the fork!’
Black Bag is not short of drama and pseudo-seductive attention-grabbing devices. But it all feels dwindled, trammelled down as if the characters were attending the wrong party. Sure, the actors are a feast. But their identity crisis in a plot that shakes the espionage genre by its shoulders, is palpable.
