A Review of Black Bag, or, Radically Proficient Experiments in Marriage and Moviemaking
"Are you clenching your sphincter right now?"
Black Bag, the 33rd feature directed by Stephen Soderbergh, is about three marriages.
The first is the marriage between the film’s two main characters, George Woodhouse and Kathryn St. Jean, a pair of high-ranking intelligence agents for the British government. Almost as soon as the credits roll, George is learning that a mole in their office is in the process of selling a nuclear weapons technology to a dangerous buyer, and since George happens to be the only spy in history who has never cheated on his wife, one of the five potential suspects is, of course, Kathryn. The other four suspects are his subordinates at MI6, all of them younger, hornier, eager to ascend in the ranks, and effusively reverent of George’s and Kathryn’s professional and marital accomplishments. As custom dictates, the couple has every possible traitor over for dinner and then douses one of the entrees with truth serum. Only one person (not the guilty party) gets stabbed with a steak knife.
The movie’s second marriage exists off-screen and behind the camera. In the span of three months, the creative partnership between Soderbergh and the screenwriter David Koepp has shot, edited, and released two complete films: Black Bag and Presence, a spooky formal exercise shot entirely from the first-person POV of a ghost. Soderbergh and Koepp previously collaborated on Kimi, the work-from-home pandemic paranoia thriller starring Zoe Kravitz. Though it has been justifiably memory-holed, Kimi represented a partial return to competency for Soderbergh, who, in the humble opinion of this newsletter, has spent the larger part of the past ten years making abysmally bad movies. (Note: the shittier those movies got, the more critics applauded them.) Koepp has somehow fared worse over the same period, penning the screenplays for objective catastrophes like Indiana Jones & the Dial of Destiny and the Tom Cruise Mummy reboot when he wasn’t directing Mordecai. Given how direly these two legacy artists needed to display a simple proficiency in writing and directing, you can see why they might enter into a marriage of convenience.
The last marriage has been arranged by wider economic and discursive forces in the entertainment industry, which have unfairly wedded the successes and failures of Black Bag to those of The Electric State, the $320-million straight-to-Netflix shlockbuster directed by the Russo Brothers. Black Bag, despite its tempered ambitions and formulaic pleasures, has against its will become a talking point in overblown debates about “the death of the movies,” mostly due to its involvement in one of the weakest box office weekends since the 2020 lockdowns. For some, the gross juxtaposition between Black Bag and The Electric State, the competing rationales behind their productions and their diverging receptions from audiences, offer a troubling preview of a bleak moviegoing future that has maybe already arrived. Picture it: Well-made films like Black Bag play to a nation of empty theaters, while tens of millions of couch junkies get tag-team-lobotomized by “watching” The Electric State while droolscrolling on their phones.
Blessedly, any behind-the-scenes meta-conversations about Black Bag are far from mind once the movie’s plot shifts into gear. What gradually becomes apparent, though never showily apparent, is that this is a through-and-through professional production; its story beats and character details are well-considered, the talents of its cast are fully harnessed, and its resources are properly, fastidiously allocated. (Even the runtime—93 minutes!—doesn’t allow for dithering.) As George hones in on the mole, Black Bag doesn’t just feel like a nostalgic throwback to the entertainingly intelligent espionage films of yore, but to the earlier, full-of-promise chapters of Soderbergh’s and Koepp’s respective careers. This whole review could have analyzed how the film’s climax, which masterfully intercuts George’s polygraphing of multiple characters, doubles as an interrogation of the self-interests and short-term thinking that have corrupted Hollywood, but any further description of the sequence would do it a disservice. The scene is so smart and fun that it would be a sin to burden it with over-analysis.
Two of the marriages in Black Bag, the one between its characters and the one between its director and writer, are anything but radical. George and Kathryn are in a long-term monogamous heterosexual union, and Soderbergh and Koepp have been tapped to make a film that challenges neither of them to step outside their comfort zones. In context, however, these boring-in-the-abstract elements start to feel kinda radical. The first marriage asks, Is simple devotion to another person any less complex than unhappiness? The second asks, Is the dedication and focus necessary to produce a well-made movie still possible? For both questions the answer is the same, and once you figure it out here’s one more question: Have we become wedded to an incomplete definition of what makes for a successful movie in the 2020s?
The title of Black Bag refers to a kind of safe word in George’s and Kathryn’s marriage; since they work in different departments, they say “black bag” whenever a topic is absolutely off-limits, too perilous to discuss. Here, there’s a lesson to be learned about the importance of maintaining some semblance of mystery between you and your life partner, but there’s also an acknowledgement of how, even in the Information Age, there will always be some informational asymmetry in our assessments of ourselves, others, what we think is happening and the actuality of what really is.
Box office performance, for instance, only tells a portion of one part of the story. The earnings from Black Bag’s on-demand purchases and rentals? They’ll be put in the black bag. What about how much money streamers will pay to acquire its rights? Another black bag. We actually know very little about how movies live on after their theatrical runs end, but what we can know for certain is this: Making one pretty good spy romp isn’t going to save theaters or the film industry, no more than one act of compassion or kindness will repair a failing marriage. Consistency, sustained care, day-in-day-out devotion—these are the only solutions to these problems that can seem unsolvable in movies and in marriages. Boring? Yes. But no secret.