Sometimes when life’s getting hectic and the the winter confines you to your living room (or even better - the cinema), what you need is a tight 90 minute escape served up by a masterful filmmaker. Steven Soderbergh may have released the perfect example of this earlier this year.
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Michael Fassbender, Black Bag. |
Black Bag stars Michael Fassbender as George Woodhouse, a spy tasked with finding the traitor within his intelligence organisation and preventing said defector from releasing the top-secret software programme named “Severus”.
Early in the film, George gathers the five suspects at his home for a dinner party. They include Naomi Harris as the in-house Psychiatrist, Zoe, Regé-Jean Page as the newly promoted James, Marisa Abela as the younger, naive Clarissa and Tom Burke as the outspoken Freddie. To make the dinner more interesting, the four guests are made up of two couples and have their relationships scrutinised by George at the table. To make the dinner even more interesting, the fifth and final suspect is George’s Wife, Kathryn, played by Cate Blanchett. The cast seems to get better the longer you watch the film with Pierce Brosnan’s introduction as Arthur Stieglitz, the head of the organisation demonstrating how he would probably still make a pretty good James Bond today.
If there’s one thing George Woodhouse hates, it’s liars. With uncompromising methods he sets out scrutinising his colleagues, including his wife, at times even putting his own reputation on the line. David Koepp’s brilliant script throws up plenty of misdirects that ensure that the audience never truly know what’s going to happen or who they can trust. Just when you think you have someone worked out, you’re thrown a little hint that all is not what it seems. The story itself is clever and slick and the result is thoroughly enjoyable.
As George probes his suspects, relationships, both romantic and professional, are tested; most of all, George’s own marriage is called into question. As eluded to in the film, this profession lends itself to cheating - it’s just so easy for them. This serves as a reminder that underneath the glossy exterior, at the heart of the film is a study of relationships and personal ambition and the trade-off with doing the right thing.
Despite being set in the world of espionage, people shouldn’t expect a mission-impossible style, action-packed flick. Yes there’s surveillance footage, drone attacks and secret meet-ups, and this film is very much in the vein of a John le Carré novel, but at the heart of it is a relationship and a question of morality.
In recent years, it’s easy to argue that the art of the 90 minute film has been lost. Increasingly so, it has felt that movies feel that they need to pad their runtime out and in doing so, risk seeming self-indulgent or worse, end up losing the audience somewhere along the way. That’s not to say movies should be short. In fact it works both ways, and some films feel like things have been left on the cutting room floor that shouldn’t have been. Black Bag is so efficient in its storytelling that it doesn’t feel long or short. Not a scene is wasted and it doesn’t leave the audience short-changed. Will it be a film that sticks with you and has you pondering some of life’s biggest questions? No. Is it an entertaining genre piece that is brilliantly written, directed and casted and doesn’t overstay its welcome? Definitely.
★★★★
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