In this age of decadent pop cinema, in which movies with no style or point run for 300 minutes each, the razor-sharp sleekness of Steven Soderbergh’s “Black Bag” is an act of rebellion. It’s a call for movies with flair, rather than movies that are indistinguishable from streaming TV eyesores, and for movies that know precisely what they are here to do, entertain, with no half-baked sociopolitical preaching or posturing.
Do not take it for granted. I’m already seeing “Black Bag” being condescended to as a fun trifle. Even if that is what it is, how often do you encounter fun trifles in the theaters these days? Style is substance, especially in movies. Most of what we internalize about movies, most of what shapes us from movies, is style. The “substance” of most movies, to paraphrase Orson Welles, could be written on the head of a pin.
“Black Bag” opens on a man in motion. This 93-minute movie has no time for dilly-dallying. Soderbergh’s camera follows him, with the back of the man’s head in the center of the frame as he descends into the bowels of a British club. Like Michael Mann, Soderbergh is attentive to soundscapes, in this case to how the sounds of the music and the patrons resound differently in each room. The heightened sense of texture and the opening in media res are immediately gripping. Buckle up.
We are following George Wodehouse (Michael Fassbender). He’s dressed impeccably, with the glasses that Michael Caine wore in the Harry Palmer movies. He learns from an informer that their agency has a rat in the house, which risks the release of something called Severus. Rather than mount an exposition dump that’s characteristic of contemporary movies and TV, Soderbergh and the veteran screenwriter David Koepp let us wonder about Severus for a good while.
The people who are mentioned as possible rats are Freddie Smalls (Tom Burke), Clarissa Dubose (Marissa Abela), Col. James Stokes (Regé-Jean Page), Dr. Zoe Vaughan (Naomie Harris), the agency’s psychiatrist, and George’s own wife, Kathyrn St. Jean (Cate Blanchett). George sets about flushing out the culprit, inviting these characters over for dinner at his and Kathryn’s chic and enviable brownstone.
This dinner runs at least 10 minutes, and Soderbergh stages it as hypnotic battle of wills, capitalizing on the fact that we, having just entered the movie, are in the cold about these people ourselves. “Black Bag” is the rare modern movie that delights in being ahead of us. Freddie is a womanizer with a kind of admiring bitterness towards George, who is seeing Clarissa, a tech with a volatile temperament. Zoe is seeing James, and her resentments of him cross-pollinate with Clarissa’s hostility towards Freddy. George and Kathryn, the epitome of the posh and brainy and stylish middle-aged British couple, subtly orchestrate the chaos. It’s a mission as bonding activity as passive-aggressive assertion of supremacy.
Soderbergh and Koepp have said that the hook of “Black Bag” was to imagine “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” as a story of espionage. This dinner, and the bookending engagement that serves as the film’s climax, is when that aspiration is most apparent. As in “Virginia Woolf,” there’s a clear sense here of the differing statuses between the couples and of how the older, more established couple feeds on the energy of the others. That said, “Black Bag” generally suggests a blend of Soderbergh’s breakthrough film “Sex, Lies and Videotape” with John Le Carré’s novel “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.”
“Black Bag” is composed mostly of scenes of people talking, with the understanding that every word either has multiple meanings or none. As in “Sex, Lies and Videotape,” and “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” for that matter, we’re asked to sort through thickets of highly charged words that casually reflect a character’s baggage in the hopes of getting at a larger truth that might not exist to begin with. It’s espionage as a symbol of the existential vulnerabilities that spring from living in a relationship. Each scene is an interrogation, framed and edited by Soderbergh into skewed shards that meld faces with the lush countryside and lux office spaces.
Of course, we don’t care about Severus. It’s George and Kathryn that concern us. Can their marriage stand up to spy games? Are they the infallible movie-star deities that they claim to be? Fassbender and Blanchett are delicious together, and the supporting players, including Pierce Brosnan as the agency’s head, are nimble. Actors have a way of coming alive for Soderbergh, as they once did for Robert Altman.
It’s ultimately Fassbender’s movie though. When he’s miscast, his work can feel indistinct, but when he has a role that allows him to shade wordplay with vulnerability, he’s indelible. You can feel in George’s very crisp diction an expression of power. And yet Fassbender manages to give a quietly poignant performance as a man who is forced to live almost entirely in his own head in order to survive. Fassbender allows you to feel the loneliness of George’s intelligence, and the reprieve that Kathryn offers from that loneliness. He’s Le Carré’s George Smiley, sexed up. For the record, a movie that sexualizes intelligence is not to be taken for granted either.
Errol Morris’ “Chaos: The Manson Murders” feels like the work of a canny filmmaker seeking to cash in on a trend. That’s disappointing from someone of Morris’ caliber. But, if there are any certainties in the modern world, it’s that people like to watch horror movies and stream true-crime docs, myself included. The story of Charles Manson blends both, of course. Manson’s orchestration of the Tate-LaBianca murders in August of 1969 is among the most famous crimes in American history. It has been dissected, analyzed, and fictionalized endlessly. What’s left?
The hook of “Chaos,” based on a nonfiction bestseller by Tom O’Neill and Dan Piepenbring, is an attempt at a new explanation for Manson’s hold on his Family, the army of mostly teenage hippies who killed for him. Was he a charismatic street hustler or did he have a connection to the CIA and its MKUltra program, which experimented in mind control? Was Charles Manson a puppet master of Manchurian candidates, a monster inadvertently created by the darkest corners of the American government?
That’s a tantalizing idea, but “Chaos” offers no evidence. Maybe the book is more persuasive, I have not read it. But the best we have here is a psychiatrist office that was once frequented by Manson and people connected to MKUltra. Morris and O’Neill don’t even have any evidence that they were ever in the same room at the same time. The CIA angle, as proffered here, is something like the Bigfoot or Loch Ness Monster of crime reporting: a crock of would-shoulda-maybes. At least Bigfoot gives us vague photos, tantalizing tidbits here and there. This story doesn’t even give us that.
Morris is on stronger ground when playing the hits, which compose at least an hour of the documentary’s 96 minutes. We’re reminded of how the Tate-LaBianca murders suggested the curdling of the revolution, via sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll, of the ‘60s. We’re reminded that Manson used to party with people like Dennis Wilson, and that he showed promise as a musician in his own right. Some of Manson’s music isn’t bad, and interview footage suggests that he was a magisterially hypnotic fraud.
Morris, whose 1988 film “The Thin Blue Line” essentially invented the modern true crime documentary, re-spins these narratives quite stylishly, whipping up a froth of conspiratorial murder and avarice and exploitation and failure. His skill undermines his own thesis. Manson here still seems to be a gifted and connected con artist and drug dealer, a monster of human proportions who channeled the evil lying underneath the narcissistic hedonism of a terrifying time. That’s a more ordinary explanation for what happened in 1969, which is to say that it’s scarier.
“Black Bag” is now in theaters, while “Chaos: The Manson Family” is on Netflix.
