Steven Soderbergh’s The Christophers is a two-handed, modest bit of drama driven by a pair of eminently watchable actors—no more nor less. It’s Soderbergh applying a deceptively low-key style to a few weighty subjects, in the tale of a formerly renowned painter in his twilight, played to perfection by the one and only Ian McKellen, the principal reason to see the film.
Soderbergh, as prolific for four decades as any filmmaker in the world, made two very different pictures last year (Presence, Black Bag) and here a dissimilar third; he’s subject-agnostic at this career juncture, and few directors move as comfortably across genres or work as quickly. As a stylist, Soderbergh is now far from his days of Traffic, Che, Contagion and other big studio sprawls; today, his style is minimal, simple, and rendered in a far lower key; his stories are also pointedly smaller and more intimate. Yet his restlessness makes one wonder whether the quality always keeps pace with the output. It’s hard not to feel like it’s been a while since he’s made a major American movie (perhaps 2012’s Magic Mike).
That isn’t to say The Christophers doesn’t intrigue in its own right; it certainly does. While last year’s terrific marital spy roundelay Black Bag may have been craftier all around, this story of art and authenticity is perhaps Steven Soderbergh’s most character-centric in quite some time. And its characters are mostly worth spending time with.
From a screenplay by Ed Solomon, a full-command Ian McKellen plays Julian Sklar, a once-famed artist whose better days are behind him, and it’s been some time since the actor has been given a screen opportunity this formidable—perhaps all the way back to his Oscar-nominated 1998 portrait of director James Whale in Bill Condon’s Gods and Monsters. Here he’s playing a character that’s fallen out of favor in the art world that made him, while his unscrupulous adult children hatch a plot to exploit him for an inheritance.
How they plan to do this involves Lori Butler (the excellent Michaela Coel), a once hopeful painter ruined by reality show stint and now a sometimes art restorer making a living at a food truck window, and whom Sklar offspring Sallie (Baby Reindeer’s Jessica Gunning) and Barnaby (James Corden) hire to surreptitiously forge a series of decades-unfinished paintings—the Christophers—which their father never completed. They presume they’ll get tens of millions for the eight paintings, his third series following a pair that netted an earlier fortune.
Julian is immediately suspicious of Lori’s intentions, and even warns her not to scheme about the Christophers, but Lori plays coy with her own art acumen as not to jeopardize the long con; instead, she merely shows up and quietly tunes in (giving McKellen much room to flex), a far cry from the sycophants Julian gets paid to regale on Cameo. He hasn’t painted in ten years, and in the modern world is regarded as a caricature, but has this fallen-from-grace artist and former TV personality lost his mojo or perhaps his mind?
While Julian has a propensity for monologues, Lori is a terrific foil, keeping close to the vest; secrets will come out, including a brief intersection years earlier between the pair. One of the movie’s smartest qualities is how Lori holds her cards until later in the picture, and after a friendship develops, can finally tell Julian, and us, everything she knows about art—and this doozy of a scene, where she analyzes Julian’s motivation and evolving style in the Christophers, surmising his technique and artistic intentions while linking them to his creations, is the movie’s apex.
There’s a theatricality to The Christophers, which is to say the bulk of it is two characters talking in a series of scenes where virtuoso and assistant gradually come to know each other, and much of it is set in Julian’s seen-better-days, shabby townhouse on the Thames, a well-worn feat of production design by Antonia Lowe. It’s a place with a history, Julian a former fixture of the London art world, and it’s filled with the sort of decaying elegance of what once was, all art and literature and ghosts of the past; if you’re going to set a movie largely in one location, Lowe has crafted a pretty darn inviting one.
Shot and edited (under pseudonyms) by director Soderbergh, The Christophers is a Pandora’s box that feels understated but effectively manages dramatic tension, mystery, and, in Lori, a character who comes gradually to full flower; by its end, Coel nearly matches McKellen, who brings an A-game here better than just about any other working actor. Where the movie ends up—who inherits the Christophers in a final, inspired exhibition sequence involving Lori’s art installation tribute to Julian and a tender final surprise—gives this deceptively small movie real gravitas.
3 stars
