Thoughts on Black Bag

   Last Monday, I went to the Angelika Film Center in New York City and saw the 2025 spy thriller Black Bag, directed by Steven Soderbergh and written by David Koepp. The film stars Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett as a couple, George and Kathyrn, who work for MI6 in England as intelligence agents. George is given the task of investigating the leak of a top-secret software program code-named Severus, and Kathryn is suspected by the agency of betraying her country, and George is suspicious of his wife and his fellow agents, who are two pairs of couples and personal friends, playing psychological games with them to uncover the mole.

    I liked how tight this film felt in just 90 minutes, with a lot of excellent acting from Fassbender, Blanchett, Naomie Harris, Regé-Jean Page, Marisa Abela, and Tom Burke. The movie has a standout dinner scene early on where George plays a game with his guests to get them to make a resolution for their partner to improve their own habits, which inevitably leads to them pushing their buttons and insecurities. I really liked the one-on-one scenes with the three varying pairs of actors, like a therapy session between Kathryn and the agency psychiatrist Zoe (Harris) where they try to interrogate each other, or Clarissa (Abela) being dragged into hacking confidential surveillance equipment so a couple can spy on each other, or a scene where George is interrogating others through polygraph tests (even if polygraph tests are now largely seen as inaccurate and inadmissible in court) that is more light and comedic.

    I especially liked how characters, when in the MI6 offices, would wait until a door fully closed on its own before sharing confidential information, as a little detail. David Koepp, the screenwriter, wrote the screenplays for Carlito’s Way, Jurassic Park, Mission: Impossible, Spider-Man, and directed Stir of Echoes and Premium Rush, so I’m happy the film shares those films in common with combining suspense, action, and humor. And Soderbergh is a consummate filmmaker who has worked steadily for decades on independent films, thrillers, crime films, action films, and comedies, and manages to craft a fun caper with a stellar cast.

Thoughts on Hester Street

     On Criterion last week, I watched Hester Street, a 1975 comedy-drama written and directed by Joan Micklin Silver, adapted from Abraham Cahan's 1896 novella Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto. The film focuses on the lives of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who move to the Lower East Side of New York City in 1896, and live on Hester Street. Yankel (Steven Keats) is a recent immigrant, who has become fluent in English, works in a sweatshop, goes by the anglicized name Jake, and quickly assimilates into American culture. Despite that he is married, and awaiting the arrival of his wife Gitl (Carol Kane) and his son Yossele, he has an affair with Mamie (Dorrie Kavanaugh), a Polish Jewish immigrant who doesn't know that he is married. 

    When Gitl arrives, she is an Orthodox Jewish woman who keeps her hair covered in a wig, and Yankel immediately pressures her to let her natural hair be shown in public, emphasizing that they are in America now. But Gitl is shy and apprehensive in this new country, she only speaks Yiddish and very little English, and is the target of her husband's abuse, who demands that their son should be known as "Joey" from now on. Yankel is also mocking and bullying towards Bernstein (Mel Howard), another Jewish immigrant who seems more meek and quiet in comparison to Yankel's loudness. Mamie is horrified to learn that "Jake" is married, and treated her like his mistress, as when she comes to his home (a small tenement apartment consisting of a kitchen/living room combo and a bedroom) and discovers that he has a wife and child. Yankel covers it up for Gitl, claiming she's one of his co-workers at his job, but she learns the truth through their neighbor, Mrs. Karvarsky (Doris Roberts).

    The film is really fascinating to watch, as a black-and-white movie meant to evoke old photographs of Jewish ancestors who emigrated to the U.S. to escape persecution by the Cossacks in Russia and Eastern Europe, and living in their own ghetto neighborhood where they speak Yiddish and don't interact with the world outside of it. Gitl, late in the film, asks Yankel "Where are all the gentiles?" That for all of Yankel's talk about how they are in America now and should assimilate with English names and customs, that they are still essentially in their same community across an ocean.

    Carol Kane was fantastic in this film, as a theater actor who had only appeared in a few films at this time, including Dog Day Afternoon and The Last Detail. Her wide, searching eyes and limited dialogue speaks so much, as an immigrant woman realizing that she's still in the same world, with a sexist husband that sees their marriage as one of convenience and control, not of love or respect. She wants to hold onto her customs instead of outright rejecting them when being on American shores, with speaking Yiddish and keeping her hair covered. Joan Micklin Silver's adaptation of the novel and her writing of Gitl is a feminist retelling, and I agree with Andrew Craddock on Letterboxd who described Kane's portrayal as "a delicate, quietly defiant performance."

    It's a very intimate and personal film, about Jewish life in New York City, depicting immigrant life with overhead shots of the streets with carts and carriages and English and Yiddish intermingled spoken. Silver chose to do this project because of her own Jewish heritage, and her family's reluctance to talk about their immigration experience several decades prior, and she wanted to honor their legacy.

    50 years later, it holds up well as a great film, and rightfully earned Kane an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. I'm really glad that I watched it, and the subject matter relates well to my day job as an archivist of Jewish historical archives.

    

Thoughts on The Friend

    Last week, I went to the Angelika Film Center in New York City to see The Friend, a 2024 dramedy written and directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel (The Deep End; What Maisie Knew; Bee Season), based on the novel by Sigrid Nunez. It stars Naomi Watts as Iris, a writer and college professor living in Greenwich Village in her late father's rent-controlled apartment on Washington Place, whose longtime friend Walter, a fellow writer and professor who has been married three times, suddenly dies by suicide, and unbeknownst to her, made her the "continency plan" to take care of his five-year old, 150-lb Great Dane, Apollo. Iris learns about this from one of his ex-wives, and despite that her building doesn't allow dogs, and that she doesn't want this responsibility while she is still grieving the loss of her friend, she takes in Apollo, who proceeds to take over her bed and trash her home when she's out, as when Iris comes in, a neighbor (Ann Dowd) knowingly says, "He missed you," meaning he was likely barking and howling so the neighbors could hear. The super warns Iris about no dogs, not wanting management to evict her and make her lose her rent-controlled cheap apartment.

    Iris is struggling with taking care of this dog, who is grieving the loss of Walter like she is, through some particular good animal acting by Bing, like sitting and listening to Walter's writings being read aloud or howling at the ceremony when Walter's ashes are spread over water. Iris didn't ask for this, and doesn't like that her friends treat her as a charity case, telling her she lives in a "shoebox" (when her apartment as a studio/1 bedroom is much larger and more spacious than average NYC apartments today), and as she tries to find a permanent home for Apollo while feeling guilty that she can't take care of him like Walter entrusted her to do, she is coming to terms with her grief, with her anger over Walter's decision, and knowing the dog is one of her last connections to Walter. She is also left to edit his unfinished novel, as well as dealing with Walter's three wives, and his adult daughter who suddenly showed up in the picture, all with their own individual histories with him.

    I felt the movie was long at two hours, and there were several times in the last quarter of it when I kept thinking it would end, but it would continue. Despite that, I liked the movie as a drama about grief, writing, dogs, and friendship. Naomi Watts was wonderful to watch in the film, especially in a scene when she meets with a therapist to try to have the dog registered as an emotional support animal so she can keep him in a last-ditch effort, and she delivers some marvelous acting when venting about her grief and sadness and anger about Walter and her history with him.

    When I saw the film on March 28th, there was a Q&A afterwards with Scott McGehee, David Siegel, and Naomi Watts, talking about the film and finding the right dog for Apollo, selecting Bing after a nation wide search. Watts talked about how she had two 20-minute sessions a day with Apollo, in order for him to slowly get used to her, and how she as a dog person had to play someone who isn't fond of dogs, and improvising along with him in scenes when he wasn't acting, like a scene where she argues with a security guard who won't allow dogs in the building, and the dog just sat down, so she sat down too, going along with it.

    It was nice seeing Carla Gugino in the film as one of Walter's ex-wives, as I've always liked her. Bill Murray himself was fine, but his image to me has been more tainted with allegations of him being abusive to several people, both professionally and personally, and him forcing a kiss on Naomi Watts during the press tour, when she just got married last year to Billy Crudup, makes him more odious to me, so I don't have much positive to say about him.

    I would recommend the film as a decent drama starring Naomi Watts and a regal, beautiful dog played by Bing the Great Dane.