L Movie Review 2Black Bag is the second Steven Soderbergh movie to arrive within two months, and while it isn’t as ingenious in conception and execution as Presence — his ghostly exercise in restricted narration — it fulfills the expectation of quality associated with this most chameleon-like of major filmmakers. Teaming once again with screenwriter David Koepp, Soderbergh whips up a spy thriller for grown-ups. A model of narrative efficiency as well as frugality, the film agilely stretches a dense cluster of incidents across a svelte 93 minutes.

The story centers on the unraveling of a marriage, when a top intelligence officer, George Woodhouse (an owlishly bespectacled Michael Fassbender), is tipped off that his wife, Kathryn (a willowy Cate Blanchett), might be a mole with plans to activate a monumental cybersecurity breach. The MacGuffin (that Hitchcockian plot trigger) is the evocatively named Severus, a cyber-worm that could precipitate a world war. There are four more suspects in the agency, all friends — Freddie (Tom Burke), Clarissa (Marisa Abela), Dr. Zoe Vaughan (Naomie Harris), and Col. James Stokes (Regé-Jean Page) — and George must put his finely honed detective skills to the test while maintaining an even keel at home, lest his equally masterful spy-wife discovers his snooping.

If the premise sounds like something Brian Clemens might have cooked up in an average episode of Thriller (not the early ’60s, Boris Karloff small-screen series but the ’70s British one), Koepp and Soderbergh clearly take pleasure in the John-le-Carré-by-way-of-Agatha-Christie shenanigans. In place of big-budget flash, there’s subdued camera intelligence, with Soderbergh himself taking charge of the moody lighting under his usual pseudonym, Peter Andrews. The characters lack clear rooting interest, but there is plot and dialogue in scenes where most movies would place pure spectacle. And Pierce Brosnan is also there, in a small but meaty role as the agency’s eminent senior member, a world-weary spy with a sinister taste for ikizukuri — sashimi served with the fish still wriggling on the platter.

Professional assassins whose loyalties are tested — and whose passion for their work is topped only by their passion for one another — have been portrayed before, perhaps most famously by Hitchcock, in his only foray into pure comedy. But Mr. and Mrs. Smith (Robert Montgomery and Carole Lombard) are, in the main, more plausibly developed and vigorously performed than the present company. Fassbender seems to be going for the tacit expressiveness of another George, namely George Smiley, in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Alec Guinness or Gary Oldman — take your pick). Fassbender’s Woodhouse is a gourmet cook who cannot abide the speck of sauce that stains his fastidiously ironed dress shirt, nor does he neglect the latex gloves while working the keyboard on a clandestine data-mining mission. Blanchett, always fascinating to watch, tries nobly to elevate what is essentially a two-dimensional role. But there isn’t enough time spent on setting up the relational dynamics of this workaholic couple to raise the emotional stakes to a Shakespearean level, let alone a le Carré–esque one. How did they meet? What do they like about each other? Have they passed through the crucible of marital suspicion and deceit before? Perhaps a few more ounces of fat on the lean running time would’ve fleshed out the characters a little more. 

But in an exercise like this, it’s craft that counts, and Koepp and Soderbergh deserve joint credit for abstaining from the temptation to sensationalize the subject matter — the most exciting scene involves a polygraph test. And the twisty plot serves as a convenient allegory about the importance of trust in marriage. The standout image is a bifurcated shot of a tiny fishing boat, with the camera placed exactly at water level. At the top half of the frame, we see two characters conversing, scheming. In the bottom half, we can barely discern the murky flora and fauna that undulate outside their range of vision. Like most of Black Bag, it’s a slithery image that neatly hints at a larger theme left relatively unexplored: the dark void that lies beneath the surface of things.