Prolific film director Steven Soderbergh famously exploded on the film scene with the breakout Indie “Sex, Lies and Videotape” in 1989, at that festival soon to be formerly held in Park City.
Last year, following a career which literally has come full circle from the massive commercial success of the “Ocean Eleven” films and winning a directing Oscar for “Traffic,” he returned to that festival soon to be formerly held in January with a small, completely different, haunted house mystery called “Presence.”
Now shifting gears again, Soderbergh delivers a dark thriller starring Michael Fassbender as George, a super spy who is asked to conduct surveillance on his wife, Kathryn.
Kathryn is played by Cate Blanchett and turns out she is also a super-spy in a different division of the same British agency. Fassbender and Blanchett sizzle as the cloak and dagger power couple and are the envy of the espionage world having somehow figured out how to make an impossible relationship work.
It turns out the secret to their success is the strategic deployment of the phrase “Black Bag,” which when uttered by any party during pillow talk or normal spousal banter, is code for a secret topic off limits and no questions asked. No matter what.
Initial scenes immediately stress the limits of the “Black Bag” utility as George is tasked with uncovering a mole in the agency and is quickly informed that his wife is a suspect. George decides to host a dinner party with several agents, each of whom possesses a unique touch point to the secrecy at issue, including his wife.
The scene is diametrically opposite of the scene by the founder of the festival soon to be formerly held in Park City in “Three Days of the Condor”, where his character has to engage in normal conversation at a dinner hosted by the spouse of a fellow spy he just found dead. Here, George employs a parlor game to ratchet up the tension to flush out the liar, a detection skill George is acknowledged to be unworldly successful at in a manner utterly free of emotional attachment of any relationship consequences.
Clever wordplay by writer David Koepp treats audiences to a rare adult experience as Soderbergh bends the spy genre to encompass caustic relationship banter with a weight equal to the espionage. Unfortunately, despite a smattering of witty one-liners by the outstanding supporting cast, the plot’s subsequent absurdities distract from the mystery at hand.
So, on my ski trail rating system, “Black Bag” earns my advanced intermediate DOUBLE BLUE ski trail rating. This elegantly constructed spy thriller and its cast will reward audiences yearning to see an intelligent drama in a cinema, but it’s slow-burn descent into melodramatic bursts triggered by who is sleeping with whom dilutes the requisite sustained tension for the mystery to fully engulf the audience. Soderbergh forgot Alfred Hitchcock’s cardinal rule for suspense, “There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.”
“Black Bag” is playing locally at Megaplex at Park City and just became available on various digital streaming services, with a run-time of one hour and thirty-three minutes. The film is rated R for language, violence and bad table manners.
