Editors Note - Today we’ve got a guest review from Joe O’Shansky. Joe is an award winning film critic who has written for The Tulsa Voice and Urban Tulsa as well as many other outlets. Today he shares with us a review of Steven Soderbergh’s newest espionage thriller Black Bag. - Charles Elmore
The filmography of Steven Soderbergh is about as marvelous as any film lover could hope for. From his low-budget indie nascence, with groundbreakers like Sex Lies, and Video Tape and King of the Hill, to the trippy intellectualism of Schizopolis and Kafka (films I saw on IFC in the ‘90s when they still played indie flicks, as opposed to the endless marathons of Everybody Loves Raymond).
Fact is, I was always on board with his cinematic muses.
When he later broke into the mainstream with Hollywood-esque blockbusters like Erin Brockovich and Traffic, I got the sense that Soderbergh’s main muse lies with riding the line between commercialism and art. For my money, my absolute favorite film (from not just him, but in life) is 1998’s Out of Sight. But there’s an eclectic slew of great flicks after, like Magic Mike, the 2011 actioner Haywire, his Ocean’s Trilogy, and the epic Che Duology peppering the ‘Aughts and early ‘10s. That is until 2013’s Side Effects was announced to be his last theatrical release. Soderbergh’s retiring from feature films? Bummer. That guy ruled.
Turns out retiring from theatrical movies is the one thing about movies that he isn’t good at. Which is how we have his latest proof of cool, Black Bag.
George (Michael Fassbender, rocking a turtleneck like no other), is a British operative in England, along with his wife Kathryn (Cate Blanchett), working for an unnamed intelligence agency, along with their colleagues, Clarissa (Marisa Abela), Freddie (a glorious Tom Burke) and Dr. Zoe (Naomie Harris), the resident psychoanalyst who seems to know all of their secrets, even though all of them can refuse a question by compartmentalizing their role as “black bag” situation.
Anyway, a piece of software that could wind up killing tens of thousands of people escapes into the wild. George is conscripted to find out who among his group is the leaker of said software. And George doesn’t fuck around when it comes to a job.
Soderbergh hasn’t lost his mojo. Controlled, stylish, and cool, Black Bag is ultimately about the relationships of a group of work besties who seem perfectly willing to kill the other if that was the mission. Wearing its European, John Le Carré meets James Bond, espionage roots on its sleeve, the script by David Koepp leaves little fat on the bone. Stripped down and straight forward, Koepp nails these smart, sexy, dangerous and archetypal characters, while balancing the immediacy of the taut story with a sense of wry humor under it all that made me realize (perhaps for the first time) why guys like Raimi, Spielberg and Soderbergh like David Koepp so much.
The performances are controlled and magnetic. Once this cast grabs you, you’re on the edge of your seat, even when you’re not sure where the train is going. Fassbender is the gravity that pulls them all in, but if it’s something Soderbergh knows as well as anything else, it’s how to frame compelling performances with a killer soundtrack and sumptuous visuals.
Those sumptuous visuals are shot by Soderbergh himself -under the nom de camera Peter Andrews - while the avant garde score is once again provided by longtime collaborator David Holmes, whose soundtrack for Out of Sight should be shot into space so that other forms of life might have their frenulum minds blown by some Top 10 Best Soundtracks of all time shit. Seriously, buy everything that man has ever done.
But, yeah. Soderbergh is a master of tone and tension, among many other things, and Black Bag is a prime example of why.
Joe O’Shansky