I’m bad at watching detective and spy thrillers because it only takes the protagonist getting double-crossed one or two times for me to lose the thread. I’m too embarrassed to admit how many times I had to watch “Chinatown” before I managed to get a handle on what exactly Jack Nicholson was up to, although I could appreciate Faye Dunaway’s stunning face from the get-go.
“Black Bag,” a spy film by the Academy Award–winning director Steven Soderbergh which stars Academy Award-winning actress Cate Blanchett and the only Academy Award-nominated actor Michael Fassbender, nevertheless managed to hit the sweet spot. It was tight enough to be comprehensible but still had enough twists to avoid being trite.
It’s a very British movie. Michael Fassbender’s character, George Woodhouse, wears trim-tailored Sable Row suits and likes to fish in the countryside when not working at MI6. Cate Blanchett’s character, Kathryn Woodhouse (i.e., George’s wife and coworker), has a similar accent to the “Queen’s English” of the Dowager Countess Violet Crawley from “Downton Abbey.” Tom Burke — who plays their friend and coworker Freddie Smalls — looks like Orson Welles, the consummate American (whom he played in “Mank”), but delivers his lines in that distinctive way all stage-trained British actors do. Pierce Brosnan, who plays their boss Arthur Stieglitz, can still harness all of the English suavité he brought to 007 in the 90s.
When someone says “spy thriller,” that often implies “international spy thriller.” When I imagine a spy, I usually picture them traipsing around tropical islands or tearing through foreign metropolises. “Black Bag” mostly sticks to its overcast and moody British setting, though — it’s a “domestic spy thriller,” if you will. It vaguely touches upon the war in Ukraine, which might end up dating it in the way passing references to the USSR date old political dramas, but the audience ends up seeing a lot more of the Woodhouses’ London residence and the MI6 office building than any overseas destination.
Still, the movie’s relatively narrow scope doesn’t mean it’s boring. In fact, “Black Bag” is pretty riveting, from its zippy opening to its sudden ending. Indeed, the film clocks in at only 94 minutes long — that means you can watch “Black Bag” two times over with half an hour to spare in the same amount of time it’d take you to watch “The Brutalist” (and you’ll probably have twice as much fun watching “Black Bag,” too). I suspect the movie’s ability to be suspenseful and surprising without being undecipherable and grating is a happy consequence of this brevity. I can tolerate a maximum of two hours of twists, but after that point, the good guys and the bad guys have swapped identities so many times that I can’t really bring myself to care who ends up winning out.
Overall, “Black Bag” knew its limits and its strengths. Steven Soderbergh doesn’t have Cate Blanchett doing Catwoman-style gymnastics or Michael Fassbender doing “Mission Impossible” styled stunts. Rather, he frames the movie around two dinner parties thrown by the Woodhouses for their fellow spies — one of whom they suspect to be a traitor. The witty, feinting dialogue in these scenes is just as good as a choreographed action sequence.
While I was initially skeptical of “Black Bag,” partially because of my previously mentioned aversion to spy movies and partially because I am wary of Cate Blanchett in brunette roles, it quickly won me over. It’s certainly worth 94 minutes of your time — and if you’re a reader of the Irish Rover, maybe the fact that one character’s Catholic faith is plot-critical and elegantly treated will sell you on the picture.
If you want to see Cate Blanchett in blonde hair, though, the Browning Cinema at the Debartolo Performing Arts Center is screening the comedy horror film “Rumours” in which she plays an Angela Merkel-type Chancellor of Germany this weekend.
