By Kirk Boxleitner
The survivors’ guilt of veterans and the duplicity of international espionage make for great viewing in Kyle Hausmann-Stokes’ “My Dead Friend Zoe” and Steven Soderbergh’s “Black Bag.”
“My Dead Friend Zoe” takes a wry and occasionally acidic look at how one U.S. Army Afghanistan veteran copes (or, more accurately, doesn’t) with the loss of her best friend in uniform, all while she’s been tasked with dealing with the decline of her stoic grandfather, whose military service had inspired her to enlist in the first place.
Between “The Walking Dead” and “Star Trek: Discovery,” Sonequa Martin-Green comes to the role of Merit, our veteran protagonist, with a battle-hardened game-face.
And Ed Harris, as her grandfather Dale, is not only coming off a similarly stern paternal role in last year’s “Love Lies Bleeding,” but he’s played combat vets so often that he does it easier than breathing.
But the real revelation here is Merit’s dead friend Zoe, played by Natalie Morales, whom I first fell in love with in 2008’s “The Middleman.”
Zoe appears not only in flashback scenes before her death, but also as a phantom presence that only Merit sees or hears.
Rather than pulling a cheap seriocomic retread of “The Sixth Sense,” Hausmann-Stokes makes it clear that dead Zoe is merely Merit’s PTSD-induced hallucination.
Morales likewise does an impressively deft job of conveying the distinction between the real, remembered Zoe, who admittedly exhibited some toxic traits, and Merit’s imagined Zoe, whose flashes of spiteful cruelty reflect that she’s simply a manifestation of Merit’s self-punishing self-loathing.
A difficult but necessary part of grieving a fallen friend is acknowledging the self-sabotaging shortfalls that might have made them a pain to deal with sometimes, rather than putting them on a pedestal, and the mercurial dynamic between Merit and Zoe (in both life and death) honors this uncomfortable truth.
Hausmann-Stokes based Merit and Zoe’s stories on those of himself and his comrades-in-arms, and he stocks his support group scenes with actual veterans, including the circle’s empathetic but no-excuses leader, Dr. Cole, played by real-life U.S. Air Force veteran Morgan Freeman.
More importantly, without spoiling it, Hausmann-Stokes’ final-act twist calls attention to how veterans’ lives can be lost to trauma even beyond the battlefield, so he earns the right to this film’s post-credits soap-boxing, especially since it’s for a good cause.
Black Bag’s
marriage values
“Black Bag” feels at first like Michael Fassbender is cruising on autopilot after “The Agency” on Paramount+, since he’s playing yet another clench-jawed intelligence agent rolling the hard six by mixing his questionably stable personal relationships with the fate of global security.
The added value here is director Soderbergh, fresh off the triumph of his point-of-view haunted house film “Presence” earlier this year, plus Cate Blanchett, bringing a sedately imperious confidence befitting both Galadriel of “The Lord of the Rings” and Hela from “Thor: Ragnarok.”
Blanchett’s deceptively placid smile, like the Mona Lisa gently nursing on a cough lozenge, both mirrors and balances out the throbbing temples of Fassbender’s forehead. They define the tight edges of his attempted mask of facial non-expression, whose centerpiece of obfuscation is the thick, square-lensed frame of his Michael Caine-style glasses.
Blanchett’s ability to emote subtly enough to still keep some secrets, even from the audience, is essential to the carefully constructed plotting of “Black Bag,” whose enigma unfolds to reveal a clockwork masterpiece in miniature.
Without Blanchett’s gift for ambiguity, “Black Bag” could have found itself reduced to a less pyrotechnic execution of an on-the-nose premise such as Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s “Mr. & Mrs. Smith.”
David Koepp is a prolific but deeply uneven screenwriter, so we’re fortunate that the Koepp who showed up to “Black Bag” wasn’t the one who scripted the two most recent Indiana Jones films.
Pierce Brosnan pops up just barely long enough to deliver an effortless lesson on how to handle such le Carré-homaging material, while Naomie Harris continues her paradoxical run of vividly disappearing into her characters, like a chameleon hiding behind its shifting spectrum of hues.
David Holmes’ cool musical score complements the muted tones of this film’s 1970s political thriller-influenced atmosphere and aesthetics.
While “Black Bag” as a whole ultimately amounts to a relatively lightweight mystery, its resolution still feels as refreshing and satisfying as an after-dinner mint.