The weight of expectations, what a burdensome thing. Hype creates an expectation that is never fair to the creation, the creator, or the observer. To be able to judge art with fresh eyes and ears is always a blessing, the less I know about something going in the more I will appreciate the experience.
That is nigh impossible if you’re connected into film media at all. Trailers innudate you with praise, movies are screened at film festivals up to a year in advance, and reddit posts will spoil movies in excitement with regularity. I willingly engage with people on Substack who tell me what movies might be worth a look.
I’ve gotten pretty adept at filtering out the noise around movies before I see them, I don’t watch a lot of trailers and when I look movies up, I just get the score not the comments. Sometimes a synopsis if I need to pursuade someone, but generally we pick a movie that looks interesting and go in blind.
Yesterday I saw two films on opposite ends of critical consensus, Black Bag and Opus. Black Bag, a sleek spy thriller, was directed by veteran Steven Soderbergh. Opus, a mash-up of The Menu and Midsommar, was helmed by first time writer/director Mark Anthony Green.
said that “Black Bag is the best Soderbergh movie in DECADES”, even though it isn’t the best Soderbergh this year. That would be Presence.
They aren’t alone in those opinions, with Black Bag at 97% and Opus at 38% on Rotten Tomatoes at this moment. While Black Bag blasted out of the hype station, Opus sat derailed by expectations.
I saw Black Bag first, so let’s start there.
Featuring a superstar cast headed by Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender, Black Bag was a call back to Cold War era spy thrillers in the post-9/11 survelliance hellscape we find ourselves in now.
Screenwriter David Koepp is a giant of Hollywood blockbusters, responsible for the first Jurassic Park, Mission: Impossible, and Spider-Man films. Soderbergh, an indie darling turned studio hitmaker, is responsbile for the Ocean’s Trilogy and is familiar with the sexy spy genre with his mainstream breakout hit Out of Sight.
This is a movie made by great artists running at peak efficiency. The acting is great, the cinematography, direction, editing, everything here is sharp and tight. The movie looks good and sounds good. The dialog is the only place that the movie stumbles, but more on that later.
Everything about the movie was precise. Too precise. For as fine tuned as the whole production was, it left me feeling cold. That doesn’t mean I think the praise is unwarranted, this movie has a lot to offer for fans of the genre. And I try hard to not let hype undercut my own enjoyment of art, but in this case I think it fell victim.
This feels a lot like Soderbergh channeling Rian Johnson, a subversion of spy tropes while still paying homage to the genre. In a lot of places this is a hit, Fassbender and Blanchett are spys in love who geniunely support and care for each other. People break the rules for reasons that make sense and the cat and mouse game comes to a moment that feels earned.
But, Johnson injects glee into his films. Here, the paraody is played so straight it becomes suffocating. In a much lauded dinner scene, subtext becomes dialog. People say what they mean. When used in a comedy like Bottoms, it becomes scathing social satire. Here, it does elicit some laughs but the scene came across as sterile to me.
Double entendres fly fast and furious but are met with by Fassbender’s stonefaced George Woodhouse. Fassbender is a fantastic actor, but George’s guard was up at all times, even when he was supposed to be loving toward his wife. And he was, in his own way, it just felt so dispassionate.
The movie also seems to be denouncing the survelliance state, but by the end I was left wondering if it was an indictment or an endorsement. We are treated to a smorgasbord of people justifying atrocities and forced into a reckoning for those actions except for the two protagonists.
At one point, I was hoping this would shift into neo-noir terroritory, forcing the spys to confront their own actions. By shying away from the mirror at the end instead of staring into it, Black Bag didn’t quite live up to its hype. If you’re looking for a well-executed spy thriller though, it will fit the bill.
Opus, on the other hand, came preloaded with expectations. From the studio whose reputation has just started to tarnish in A24, to the star Ayo Edebiri who has superstar pressure building behind her with a starmaking turn on FX’s The Bear. I’m left wondering if those expectations left some critics wanting, wishing for the movie that was inside instead of the movie they got.
A lot of the criticism of Opus is fair. Writer/director Mark Anthony Green’s debut pulls DNA The Menu, Midsommar, Blink Twice and even Glass Onion. The commentary comes like shotgun pellets more than sniper rounds. Second and tertiary characters are underutilized and poorly developed. This is a new voice learning to sing, but what it wants to say is worth hearing.
Green takes aim at cults of personality, celebrity worship, the complicity of journalists, and white supremacy. Edebiri stars as Ariel Echton, a young journalist denied the opportunity to report. She is described as aggressively medium by friend Kent (Beef’s Young Mazino). No one wants to hear her story because she hasn’t done anything.
When she gets an unexpected invite to Alfred Moretti’s (John Malkovich) new album release event, she is thurst into the biggest celebrity news story of the year. Also along for the journey are Ariel’s boss Stan (Murray Bartlett), TV show host Clara Armstrong (a criminally underused Juliette Lewis), social media influencer Emily (Stephanie Suganami), paparazza Bianca (Melissa Chambers), and radio shock jock turned podcaster Bill (Mark Sivertsen).
They are headed to the Levelist compound, a scientology-esque cult that worships Moretti’s genius.
We come to find out that all but Ariel have been critical of Moretti in the past but happy to bask in his glow in the present. Invited to his compound so they can report on this pop superstar’s comeback, only Ariel is concerned by the many worrying signs they witness. Most of them are not explored, only hinted at, like child endangerment in the Levelist bible through the chapter titled “Teach Them Young and Control the World.”
Malkovich is in top form, switching from inane stories to quiet menace. Even as the facade cracks and shatters, the others cling to an illusion to be a part of something. If you’ve seen the movies this pulls from, you know what comes next. The storytelling and subtext need refinement, but this was a fun movie that will be the foundation of something great.
And it is everything that Black Bag isn’t. Messy and tonally inconsistent, but it does have heart in spades. While Black Bag will draw attention for now, I think that Opus will be a movie with longer legs.
Psh, "Presence".
Fromtheyardtothearthouse.substack.com