When he’s not playing spy, George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) likes to spend his free time fishing.
A little ways through “Black Bag,” Steven Soderbergh’s sleek, sexy spy thriller, George takes fellow British intelligence agent James Stokes (Regé-Jean Page) on one of his afternoon fishing trips. James may have information that George needs, so here “fishing” is really a stand-in for an impromptu interrogation of sorts. But James doesn’t appreciate the sport of the activity – he lacks the necessary patience, patience that George has in spades. When his line finally catches, James looks to George with slight panic: “What do I do?”
“Let him run for a minute,” George answers. You get the sense he’s not talking about the fish.
In “Black Bag,” fishing, an ostensibly peaceful pastime, is not all that different from spying. A spy, like a fisherman, waits ever so patiently, letting the fish think he has the run of the lake until it’s time to strike. That patience makes George a good spy, but the other traits that come along with that profession don’t normally make for healthy relationships – something James and the rest of the agents in “Black Bag” know all too well. But to their great annoyance, George and his wife Kathryn (Cate Blanchett) seem to have figured it out. That is, until she might be the fish on the end of George’s line.
“Black Bag,” as much as it feels like an Agatha Christie mystery by way of John le Carré, isn’t so much about international spy games as it is about relationships and how, when trust disappears, romance can feel a hell of a lot like espionage in its own right. With the help of David Koepp’s smart, titillating script, Soderbergh’s spy thriller gives way to a relationship drama that crackles with wit and sensuality.
The beginning of “Black Bag” sets up the film’s conflict with style and ease. A tracking shot follows George from behind through dark hallways, into a pulsating club, and then into an alley, where we finally see his face as he takes a list of names from a colleague. A weapon has been stolen from the agency, and one of the agents on this list is the culprit. The list includes James, fellow spy Freddie Smalls (Tom Burke), in-house psychologist Zoe Vaughan (Naomie Harris), and cyber specialist Clarissa (Marisa Abela). And, of course, Kathryn herself.
And so, George’s fishing begins. He hatches an Agatha Christie-like plan, inviting all of the suspects to a dinner party where the main course is chana masala infused with truth serum. As the night progresses, we learn that it’s not just Kathryn and George who have coupled up, but James and Zoe, and Freddie and Clarissa as well.
As the truth serum and the wine begin to take hold, it becomes clear how much each couple has been lying to each other. Zoe seems none too pleased with her sex life (“What every woman longs for,” she says dryly to a crack about James’ prowess in bed. “An endless, abrasive experience.”), and before long, Clarissa and Freddie’s sharp retorts turn into a full-fledged shouting match about Freddie’s alleged infidelity.
On its face, none of this has anything to do with a stolen weapon. But for George, it’s information collection. He lets the screaming match between Clarissa and Freddie rage on (a good thing for many reasons, not the least of all because Tom Burke’s high-pitched whine of “Get some help!” in Clarissa’s face is one of the funniest line deliveries of the year). When George finally does break in, it’s to confirm Clarissa’s suspicions about Freddie’s cheating. As he speaks, we see a series of dutch angles frame each dinner guest’s face. It’s the same series of shots Soderbergh will use later during a polygraph test sequence – the romantic truth that comes out during a drunken dinner party is just as important as the intel that arises during a lie detector test.
After this sequence of “Black Bag” ends and the dinner guests leave, the truths revealed here inform the characters’ actions for the rest of the film. But for as much as the relationships around them begin to fall apart, Kathryn and George stay steady, treason be damned. Kathryn, of course, knows the dinner was a set up to catch a thief – George told her as much, and even told her to avoid the drugged chana masala – but she doesn’t know that she herself is included in the suspect list. They don’t pretend there is absolute truth between them, not when the realities of their work necessitate they keep secrets. But there is a sense of trust, and in this profession, that might matter more. Throughout the film, it’s repeated that George hates liars and cheats – and yet, the fact that his wife is hiding possible traitorous behavior from him doesn’t phase him nearly as much as the idea that she may not trust him enough to tell him in the first place.
The other two couples spend the entirety of “Black Bag” struggling to define the difference between those two things, truth and trust. In a later scene, Clarissa all but pleads with George for an answer – how do you make a relationship work between two people whose entire lives revolve around lying to each other? For George and Kathryn, the answers seems to rest in a healthy amount of sexual attraction laced with the thrill of danger – when George tells Kathryn he’d do anything for her, she sensually croons, “Would you kill? Would you lie?” But for all that to work amid a sea of secrets and lies, trust must come first. And that’s true for any marriage, regardless of its joint national security clearance.
