By M. Faust

In my preview summary last week for Black Bag, I described it as “Director Steven Soderbergh back in high commercial mode.”

Since re-defining the term “independent film” with his 1989 debut Sex, Lies, and Videotape, the prolific Soderbergh has proved equally adept at small “art” films and can’t-miss audience pleasers like the Ocean’s Eleven movies.

Given that this film boasted a script by David Koepp (Jurassic Park, the latter Indiana Jones movies, a slew of Tom Cruise vehicles), I assumed that this spy tale was going to be Soderbergh tilting toward the blockbuster side again. 

Well, one should never assume. The script for Black Bag has enough twists that might have been turned into a more audience-pleasing entertainment by another director; Soderbergh approaches it minimally, almost to the point of a chamber drama. 

The premise involves a half dozen British intelligence agents, very much in the office-bound John le Carré mode. One of them is a mole, and it is up to George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) to figure out which one. He has a week to accomplish this task. And the list of suspects includes his wife Kathryn St. Jean (Cate Blanchett). 

George and Kathryn have a marriage that is the envy of their colleagues, even those who openly mock at their “flagrant monogamy.” The film’s title refers to one tactic they use to manage this: “black bag” is code for anything they cannot discuss with each other. Though intended to protect sensitive state secrets, it offers at least the potential to cover up personal sins as well. 

George decides that the best way to accomplish his task is to get all of the suspects together for a dinner party. The film is constructed around two such gatherings, one to set the ball in motion and another to draw conclusions. These are conducted with at least one open reference to that masterpiece of domestic squabbling Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. (Was Blanchett’s character named Martha in an early draft of the script?) 

Black Bag clocks in at a trim 93 minutes. Other directors might have taken more time with this material, exploring the particularities of the characters in a bit more detail. Casting more familiar performers in the secondary roles would also have helped, though that would presumably have called for a larger budget than Soderbergh had to work with. I suspect that he chooses to accept less funding in return for greater autonomy (though serving as his own cinematographer and editor must help in that area.) The result is sleek and elegant, but somewhat lacking in impact: Koepp’s story might have easily have been adapted as a short film. 

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While I am owning up to mistakes, I will also note that my preview for another new release, Novocaine, described the main character as a dentist. He is in fact the assistant manager at a bank; I must have been thinking of the 2001 film noir parody of the same title starring Steve Martin. The two are related in no way other than a level of gruesomeness that not all audiences will enjoy. 

This Novocaine is currently the top grossing film at the box office, which I guess has to do with the popularity of star Jack Quaid, son of Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan and popular for his role on the satirical superhero series The Boys. He plays a fellow who is congenitally unable to feel pain, for which reason he was overly sheltered by his parents. He is brought out of his cocoon in a memorable 24-hour period when he falls in love with a co-worker (Amber Midthunder) who is taken hostage by a trio of vicious bank robbers. 

The point of creating a character who is unable to feel pain is obviously to subject him to brutality that would be unbearable to the average human being.

And to do that, you will need antagonists who are demonstrably sadistic. This is exactly what the movie provides. It does so with a generally comic tone, but not so comically as to mitigate the effect of watching the bad guys do awful things to the hero.

It was not as bad as I was expecting — my tolerance for this kind of thing has diminished substantially since my years as a horror movie buff — but there were still scenes that I refused to watch. (One involved a pair of pliers.) I presume the film’s producers are already hard at work on a string of sequels, none of which I will bother with.