Mickey 17 | Black Bag
A sci-fi satire and a spy thriller each explore the question of what holds people together.
Mickey 17
Mickey Barnes has an existential problem. He’s an “expendable,” a person who, through the magic of technology, can be “printed” into a new body whenever his old one dies. The new body gets a backup copy of memories from the previous body, effectively allowing a person to live again after they’ve died. This technology is controversial enough that it’s been outlawed on Earth, where the inhabitants have enough other problems, such as environmental and economic collapse, that they don’t want to add another moral conundrum to the mix. Colonist ships, on the other hand, are perfectly happy to exploit the labor of an expendable on their quest to establish homes on other planets. Interstellar travel is dangerous; why risk the lives of many people when one single expendable can die and be reborn over and over again for the good of the entire colony?
Director Bong Joon-ho leans into the sticky moral questions that the characters back on Earth would prefer not to deal with and that the colonists on Mickey’s ship are happy to ignore. Mickey himself is stuck with the worst jobs, the dangerous ones that no one else wants to do, suffering and dying repeatedly. Sometimes his suffering is worth it: he’s the reason the ship’s scientists are able to develop a vaccine against a particularly nasty offworld virus. Most of the time, he shoulders unnecessary risk. He’s exposed to solar radiation so the scientists can satisfy their curiosity; he’s forced to take on the riskiest jobs so that the rest of the crew don’t have to risk their own lives exploring dangerous parts of their new planet.
This all sounds like grim fare, but the movie is genuinely funny, balancing the awful facts of Mickey’s existence with hilarious details. Sometimes it’s slapstick, sometimes it’s a wry turn of phrase, and sometimes it’s the absurdity of the situation. There’s a great repeating gag of a new Mickey body being printed, the printer shuddering as though it’s experiencing a paper jam. Robert Pattinson’s body flops out of the machine like so much loose-leaf. He’s on his seventeenth body, and life isn’t getting any easier for him.
Robert Pattinson embodies Mickey with an expressive pathos. Each Mickey, we learn, is a little different from the others. One previous version had been whiny, another perpetually frightened, his successive lives maintaining the same personality but emphasizing different facets as repeated copies of copies grow fuzzy over time. Mickey 17 is a bit nebbishy, willing to roll over and accept his fate, even though he isn’t happy about it. Other people ask him what it’s like to die, and he’s reluctant to answer. His deaths are meaningless to the people around him; they hold his life cheap. But for Mickey, death is a personal and frightening thing, a necessary step to take before returning to his unending and thankless job. When circumstances finally come to a head, Pattinson plays a new iteration of the character with a simmering rage that belies the timidity of his predecessors. It’s fun to watch him switch between the different versions of himself, even as he begins to realize just how cheaply his life has been regarded by almost everyone else on the ship.
Bong is not interested in twisting the knife, at least not in the way he did with his previous film Parasite. Here, the critique of capitalism and classism is still present, delivered by a comically large cartoon sledgehammer instead, with a host of colorful supporting characters. Mickey must contend not just with his own life, valued cheaply, but also with everyone else who considers him to be a curiosity or an economic asset rather than a person. Mark Ruffalo plays the colony leader as a broad hybrid of Donald Trump and Elon Musk, with a dash of Pat Buchanan thrown in for good measure. Toni Colette plays his wife as the real brains of the outfit, though she keeps getting absurdly sidetracked in her pursuit of new ways to make culinary delicacies, especially sauces. Both are obsessed with establishing a “pure” colony, complete with eugenicist ideas about how to keep “their” planet pure, which include launching a genocide against the alien species they find there. The film flits from idea to idea and joke to joke in an approach that feels akin to reading a science-fiction version of The Onion, some new and hilarious atrocity popping up after the laughter dies away from the previous joke. It’s a heady stew with an eye-popping number of ingredients. But what fun to watch a comedy with teeth and ideas in its head. Bong never lets us forget that, despite racking up more deaths than the average person, Mickey is still human. He may be a sad clown, but even sad clowns deserve love and respect.—Sarah Welch-Larson
★★★☆
Mickey 17 is in theaters everywhere.
Black Bag
George (Michael Fassbender) is a spy for the United Kingdom tasked with finding a traitor. When he receives his assignment, his wife Kathryn (Cate Blanchett) is one of the people on the list. To find out the truth, Ethan Hunt would print a mask, James Bond would seduce somebody, and Jason Bourne would improvise a weapon; George makes a roast and invites the remaining suspects—all fellow agents—over for dinner.
Black Bag is Steven Soderbergh and David Koepp’s second movie this year (the first being Presence, another genre exercise I liked). Where Presence was a meditation on justice through the lens of a ghost story, Black Bag concerns itself with questions of loyalty, faithfulness, and lies, all told as a crackling spy thriller for grown-ups. When everything is permissible, when you have all the technology and resources available to do whatever you want, how do you maintain your moral compass? How do you sleep at night?
George and Kathryn’s fellow agents take the moral ambiguity of their jobs in cavalier stride. They have the money, the influence, and the tools to do whatever they want in the name of the British government; the skill that separates true professionals from everyone else is their ability to lie to and manipulate each other. George and Kathryn happen to be very good at this game. They also happen to have a reputation for being the only couple at the agency who haven’t cheated on each other. “Not everyone aspires to your flagrant monogamy, George,” chides a fellow agent. Everyone else prefers to sleep around as much as possible, claiming it’s all in a day’s work when they do it and being hurt when it’s their partner doing the cheating. It’s easy enough when the job comes with a built-in alibi, the two words “black bag” meaning “that’s classified.” On a mission? “Black bag.” Don’t want to confess what you’ve been up to? “Black bag.”
As sexy as the premise is, Black Bag isn’t interested in titillation, though it is enamored of sleek appearances that hide a dark center. Most of the action takes place in the form of heavy thought—Fassbender’s forehead is doing a lot of work here—or a tense conversation. Soderbergh frames his subjects mostly in medium close-up and shallow focus, teasing out the feeling of trying to discover the shape of a secret without giving the game away. Individual facial features remain sharp, with everything else in the background and foreground rendered in soft, glowy tones. We can see enough, but we don’t get the whole picture, and even candlelight seems indistinct, a neat shorthand for a mental image slowly coming into focus as George delves deeper into his mission.
Through it all, Koepp’s script and Soderbergh’s direction never lose sight of the moral knot at the story’s core. In a moment of vulnerability, one of George’s suspects voices the question he’s been turning over in his own mind: “When you can lie about anything, how does [a marriage] work?” She might as well be asking how society could work if everyone’s lying and no one trusts each other. How do you maintain a moral center doing amoral work? Black Bag finds a sharp point—and a sharp answer—deep under the layers of wrenching irony. Loyalty in a marriage is balanced against loyalty to one’s country, one’s way of life. You have to find an anchor. If nothing is true, then nothing really matters. Soderbergh finds what matters here, and he makes efficient work of it.—Sarah Welch-Larson
★★★★
Black Bag is in theaters now.