Matthew d’Ancona’s culture: Black Bag will keep you guessing until the very end

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spouse? Well, the designated molehunter is called George. But – unlike John le Carré’s Smiley and the adulterous Lady Ann – Fassbender’s character and his wife seem to enjoy a blissfully loving and monogamous marriage. “Black bag” is the code they use to signal that a work-related subject is off-limits in domestic conversation. Their relationship is the envy of the office. 

All the same: George still has to organise off-the-books satellite surveillance of Kathryn when she makes a secret trip to Zurich. Meanwhile, the couple invites four colleagues to their impossibly elegant townhouse for a dinner party (George, of course, is a brilliant cook) that is all part of his pitiless detective work. The chana masala is laced with truth serum to loosen their tongues.

Soderbergh, collaborating again with writer David Koepp, has acknowledged a debt to Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) and the dinner scene is indeed a tour de force, crackling with resentment, personal betrayal and chemically induced candour. James Stokes (Regé-Jean Page), recently appointed George’s second-in-command, is involved with in-house psychologist Zoe Vaughn (Naomie Harris).

Surveillance expert Clarissa Dubose (Marisa Abela) is having an affair with boozy, damaged Freddie Smalls (Tom Burke, currently packing them in alongside Blanchett in The Seagull at the Barbican). 

The workplace promiscuity is clearly pathological: a joyless consequence of the characters’ talent for secrecy and a release for the repressions that the job requires. Their entangled sex lives evoke Max Ophüls’s La Ronde (1950) as much as any conventional espionage tale. 

Are George and Kathryn really different, or just better at hiding the fault lines? Is George (Fassbender at his most compellingly impassive) professionally glacial or fully sociopathic? “I don’t like liars,” he says, as it is revealed that he made his bones surveilling his own father.

Black Bag is full of delicious grace notes, such as the casting of former 007 Pierce Brosnan as the team’s jaded and permanently furious boss, Arthur Steiglitz. The movie’s central riddle – its true “black bag” – will keep you guessing until the very end. Forty years since his first feature film, Soderbergh has rarely been better.

Adolescence
(Netflix)

Only a fortnight since the release of Toxic Town, Jack Thorne’s drama based on the Corby poisonous waste scandal, he and co-creator Stephen Graham scale extraordinary and gruelling heights in this four-part account of the murder of a teenage girl, Katie Leonard, the subsequent investigation, and the consequences of this terrible crime.

Each episode is a one-shot: the arrest and initial questioning of 13-year-old Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper, superb); the visit by DI Luke Bascombe (Ashley Walters) and DS Misha Frank (Faye Marsay) to the school of the victim and suspect; a harrowing conversation at a juvenile detention facility between Jamie and clinical psychologist Briony Ariston (Erin Doherty); and the fraught 50th birthday of Jamie’s dad, Eddie (Graham), a morning spent with his wife Manda (Christine Tremarco) and daughter Lisa (Amélie Pease).

Adolescence has much to say about masculinity, toxic or otherwise, and the baleful influence of Andrew Tate on boys and young men is mentioned explicitly. In one powerful scene, Bascombe’s son Adam (Amari Bacchus) introduces him to the precise meaning of specific emojis on Instagram, the ugliness of the “manosphere” and “red-pilling”, and the social consequences of being labelled an “incel”.

Eddie, too, struggles with the idea that Jamie’s online life in his bedroom might have radicalised him or nurtured a dangerous sense of male inadequacy. “What harm can he do in there?” he asks.

The nerve-shredding impact of Adolescence owes much to its uniformly excellent cast. But it also resists the gravitational pull of pat analysis. During the school visit, Frank expresses justified distaste to Bascombe that the police, community and media fascination with the suspect is eclipsing Katie herself: “Everyone will remember Jamie. No one will remember her”.

Nor do Thorne and Graham settle for the lazy idea that the rising rage and misogyny of young men can be blamed exclusively on the internet. Eddie and Manda have to confront their own part in what has happened. In one of the drama’s most painful moments, Graham’s character turns away from his son, consumed by absolute shame. But – it is very clear – he is ashamed of his own failure.

Ostensibly similar, but very different in form, tone and emphasis is…

Punch
(Young Vic, London, until April 26)

“I’m not like proper ‘buzzing’ yet ‘cause it’s only the middle of the day, but I’m stood kind of hyper on Trent Bridge, itching for some… some fucking… ‘action’.” Meet Jacob (David Shields), 19-year-old drug dealer, gang member, and self-styled “big bad man” in Nottingham in the summer of 2011.

It’s hard not to be reminded of Alex in Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962) and his itch for “a bit of the old ultraviolence”. But this is real life – James Graham’s latest play, based on the memoir Right from Wrong by Jacob Dunne, transferred after a triumphant run at Nottingham Playhouse.

A single punch leads to the death of James, a trainee paramedic. and Jacob’s imprisonment. When he is paroled, the dead man’s parents, Joan (Julie Hesmondhalgh, especially good) and David (Tony Hirst) decide, with mixed emotions, to make contact with him via a “restorative justice” group.

What follows is the pivot of the play, morally and dramatically. Can meeting your son’s killer assuage your grief? Should it? What right does Jacob have to talk to people whose lives he has capsized? Is the communication performative, genuinely consoling, or both?

Graham’s mastery of language enables him to capture the emotional intensity of these encounters but also to honour their profound ambiguity. Punch is a work of tentative optimism rather than routinised redemption. Its heart is honest rather than bleeding. Recommended.

Like Tears in Rain
(Viaplay)

Though Rutger Hauer was always modest about his part in writing the classic monologue in Blade Runner (1982), from which this affectionate documentary takes its title, there is little doubt (as Ridley Scott has attested) that it was his own work – 42 words spoken by his character, the Nexus-6 replicant Roy Batty, that would seal Hauer’s place in cinematic legend. As Mickey Rourke puts it: “He made Harrison Ford disappear”.

Directed by his goddaughter Sanna Fabery de Jonge, and now available to stream on the Prime Video add-on Viaplay, Like Tears in Rain makes intelligent use of previously unseen home movie footage to portray a gentle, private, adventurous man who never quite fit the Hollywood mould but was a master of his craft and a remarkable screen presence in movies such as Soldier of Orange (1977), Nighthawks (1981) and The Hitcher (1986). He loved what he called the “tap dance of fear” with the audience.

New interviews with Rourke, Whoopi Goldberg, Vincent D’Onofrio, Miranda Richardson, Paul Verhoeven, Anton Corbijn and Hauer’s wife of 50 years, Ineke ten Cate, supply insights into his life, art and character, and the resolutely bohemian ethos that guided him until his death, aged 75, in 2019. With perfect symmetry, that is the year in which Blade Runner is set.

Opus
(selected cinemas)

When reclusive pop megastar Alfred Moretti (John Malkovich) announces his return after three decades away from the limelight, a select group is invited to his remote Utah compound to hear his new album, Caesar’s Request. Think Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, reimagined by Luis Buñuel and Giorgio Moroder.

Aspiring young journalist Ariel Ecton (Ayo Edebiri) is astonished to be included, alongside her editor Stan Sullivan (Murray Bartlett), talk show host Clara Armstrong (Juliette Lewis), influencer Emily Katz (Stephanie Suganami), paparazzo Bianca Tyson (Melissa Chambers) and podcaster Bill Lotto (Mark Sivertsen). She is also the first to suspect that all is not as it seems at Moretti’s sanctuary.

As he showed in Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich (1999), nobody enjoys sending himself up as much as the 71-year-old star of Mark Anthony Green’s debut feature. Malkovich has the time of his life portraying the deranged pop idol, now at the helm of a spooky cult of uniformed “Levelists”, who are obliged to shuck hundreds of oysters in search of pearls (and have scars on their hands to show for it).

Like last year’s Blink Twice, The Menu (2022) and The White Lotus – now in its third season – Opus riffs on the idea of a glamorous setting as a venue of madness, retribution and jump scares. Though it engages with questions such as the nature of celebrity and media corruption, it does not take itself too seriously and is all the more entertaining for that.

Liverpool and the Unmaking of Britain by Sam Wetherell
(Head of Zeus)

Hat tip to TNE founder and editor-in-chief Matt Kelly for urging me to read this fantastic book. Sam Wetherell, a senior lecturer at the University of York, argues that “Liverpool’s history is a prophecy”: that the city’s story is not only intrinsically fascinating but full of portents for the future (“The history that this book describes might be coming for us all”).

What makes Wetherell’s scholarship so readable is his adroitly chosen accounts of the personal, the specific and the unexpected. We are introduced, for instance, to Malcolm McLean, a North Carolina tycoon, whose use of shipping containers in the 1950s and thereafter transformed global supply chains and, as much anything, destroyed the livelihoods of Liverpool dockers. “Obsolescence”, and how to address it, is a theme throughout the book. 

Today, population mobility and the rise of right-wing nativism have made deportation a central controversy in public discourse. So it is remarkable to learn of the brutal and mostly secret removal of Chinese workers from Liverpool in the 1940s: “a premonition of the border controls, privatised detention centres and deportations that would characterise Britain’s relationship with its former imperial subjects”.

The book is excellent on the Hillsborough tragedy, Militant, the Toxteth uprisings, the commodification of history, the resourcefulness and courage with which Liverpool dealt with the heroin crisis and AIDs epidemic in the 1980s, and much else. You can hear Sam talking about his book on The Two Matts episode posted on Tuesday, March 11.