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PORTSIDE CULTURE

BLACK BAG: NOT MUCH TO SEE HERE  
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Eileen Jones
March 19, 2025
Jacobin [[link removed]]


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_ Black Bag is being hailed by critics as highly sophisticated
cinematic fare — rather than an unambitious rush job by a talented
director eager to move on to his next, similarly unsatisfying project.
_

Cate Blanchett in Black Bag. , (Focus Features)

 

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
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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!”

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Still from Black Bag. (Focus Features)

_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”?

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Still from Black Bag. (Focus Features)

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.

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Contributors

Eileen Jones is a film critic at Jacobin, host of
the Filmsuck podcast, and author of Filmsuck, USA.

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* espionage
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* cate Blanchett
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* Michael fassbender
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* marriage
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* spies
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