Black Bag

Though Black Bag is an intelligence term, and factors heavily into Steven Soderbergh’s new movie of the same name, I am nevertheless convinced it was called that simply because the title “Spy Game” was already taken. So much more than that dour and leaden two-hour plus 2001 thriller, the brisk ninety-minute “Black Bag” glows like so many glass pendant balls strategically strewn on the dinner table where a pair of married intelligence officers invite a few co-workers less for dinner than to ferret out information while dining, twice literalizing the notion of a spy game. Indeed, “Black Bag” is at once deadly serious and light on its feet; cold as ice and so fucking hot; stony-faced and so damn funny. It’s a little like Soderbergh’s equally masterful “Haywire” that way; you don’t even realize you’re watching a comedy until Soderbergh draws some supremely dry joke during some moment of supreme tension and a laugh you never even felt coming suddenly just erupts.

As “Black Bag” begins, SIS officer George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) is summoned by his superior and ordered to utilize a list of five in-house suspects to determine who leaked top secret software. Known as a human lie detector, Woodhouse’s plan is to transform a traditional British Sunday roast into a kind of simultaneous five-person polygraph. The software, codenamed Severus, involves nuclear secrets that could leave the requisite millions of people dead, though the stakes of David Koepp’s sly screenplay are entirely personal rather than global. Indeed, one of the five suspects on George’s list is his wife, Kathryn (Cate Blanchett). In the words of the immortal Yello: Oh yeah.

As it happens, the quartet of the other intelligence operatives – Freddie (Tom Burke), Clarissa (Marisa Abela), Zoe (Naomie Harris), and Stokes (Regé-Jean Page) – who we meet for the first time pre-gaming, in a manner of speaking, at a pub before their interrogative feast, all have their own romantic entanglements with one another, illustrating what Clarissa explains at a later moment, how it’s virtually impossible to date anyone when you can’t be honest about anything and so you wind up becoming involved with people you work with and with whom you can’t really be honest either. It’s nothing short of awesome, really, with Vauxhall Cross reimagined, say, as one of those Bravo “House” shows – Summer or Winter, take your pick – in which some glam socialites are stuffed into some mod house in the Hamptons, or near the Rockies. Indeed, at dinner George initiates a game that sounds a lot like one culled from a Real Housewives show, nefariously designed to have his co-workers all turn on one another. This, to paraphrase George, is the rock, and the rest of “Black Bag” becomes the ripples.

Perhaps it strains credulity that all these operatives would willingly gather to be probed over dinner, but then again, the notion of nothing ever being believable is deftly embedded in the script. When a character has a coronary, the other characters seem to know straight away it wasn’t. Even therapy conversations with Zoe, that is, Dr. Zoe Vaughn, prove less about emotionally sharing than having through the looking glass conversations about why sharing could be detrimental. In an environment of surveillance, it’s as if they are always performing, or refusing to, embodied in the performances. Fassbender reduces George to something like a poker-faced stasis while Blanchett, always best when her patented air of theatricality is deployed with purpose, seems to treat all of SIS as a stage, every gesture and mannerism calculated for maximum effect. When George proffers an innocent explanation for how his work badge ended up in Kathryn’s purse, the way Blanchett has her slither up to him conveys that she doesn’t buy it for a second. Abela, meanwhile, in an A+ supporting performance manages to improbably skirt the middle ground between the two, coming across chaotically alive to the moment in a way those two are not.

That’s not to say, however, that George and Kathryn are not alive themselves. “Black Bag” builds to another dinner party in which George ferrets out the truth, as if George Smiley of “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” had been plopped down in the climax of “The Thin Man.” The climax, though, is just as much about the foremost married couple. Throughout, there is an undercurrent of tension, a question of how much George and Kathryn really love one another, the air in which each one declares that they’d kill for the other seeming to leave the matter unresolved rather than settled. I won’t spoil it, and though I wished Soderbergh and Koepp might have concocted a concluding bit of visual innuendo a la “North by Northwest,” they still apply an amusingly blithe period by suggesting spy operations are as much about a roll in the hay as saving the world.