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***/**** starring Ian McKellen, Michaela Coel, James Corden, Jessica Gunning written by Ed Solomon directed by Steven Soderbergh
by Angelo Muredda “It wasn’t very good, that last one,” retired octogenarian visual artist Julian Sklar says of his most recent piece in Steven Soderbergh’s The Christophers. It’s tempting to read the self-deprecating remark, written by Ed Solomon and delivered with caustic wit by the 86-year-old Ian McKellen (here embracing his irascible old icon era in a role purpose-built for him), as a pithy meta-commentary on Soderbergh’s own low-stakes late period. Whatever one thinks of the video gamey perspective-play horror of Presence or the Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?-inflected couples spy therapy of Black Bag, Soderbergh needn’t make any excuses for The Christophers. It’s a puckish, intellectually rigorous two-hander about art, criticism, and influence that goes down as easily as his pop hits but lingers in the rearview like his deeper dramatic experiments.
Shot handheld on digital in an improvisatory style by “Peter Andrews,” who makes a playground of Julian’s dusty multi-level London studio and home, The Christophers is a chamber piece pitting McKellen’s eccentric artist against thirtysomething painter and restorer Lori Butler (Michaela Coel). Lori is lured into working as his assistant under mysterious pretenses by the unscrupulous art dealer Barnaby (James Corden), Julian’s awful adult progeny, and Barnaby’s failed-artist sister Sallie (Jessica Gunning), with whom Lori went to art school. By day, Lori is tasked with make-work projects like setting up a humidifier, and forced to spend the rest of her time suffering her boss’s tirades about the indignities of art school and the silliness of kids these days rebranding infidelity as polyamory. By night, on the children’s instructions, she’s to sneak her way into the attic to complete–which is to say, forge–Julian’s unfinished and highly valued series of paintings of his old lover, the eponymous “Christophers,” so that they can be sold for a tidy profit, with a carve-out for Lori, upon his death. As soon as Julian discovers Lori’s subterfuge, their initial cat-and-mouse game ends and an uneasy but productive artistic collaboration begins, along with an extended argument about the nature of imagination and imitation.
It’s hard to distill The Christophers‘ genre-crossing charms into a neat logline, as the jazzy, quip-heavy trailer promising a caper movie and a buddy comedy suggests. That indeterminacy is to its benefit: Like Lori, who’s in the business of psychologizing Julian’s brushstrokes in order to pull off the forgery, we never really feel fully at home in the presence of the old man, who cautions her not to “squat” in his mindset. The opening stretch finds Lori coolly casing Julian’s overstuffed property, complete with a DeLonghi espresso machine that’s lovingly crusted with debris from its last use some decades back. Lori pulls a Columbo, taking the liberty of letting herself into his attic after she’s copied the key and gently rifling through his old canvases and supplies to guess at the materials he might have used to make his unfinished works, only to return to her cramped artists’ co-op studio apartment each night to forge his signature and cryptically watch videos of his snarky appearances on a reality competition show for budding artists. When his assistant is off the clock, and when he’s not recording Cameos for fans to make a little money, Julian plays detective himself, holding his glasses up to his computer screen like a magnifying glass to scan Lori’s professional website, sizing up both her work and her opinions of him in an essay she authored that casts him as a reactionary dinosaur. This introductory section has a voyeuristic quality that suggests an adaptation of a lost Patricia Highsmith text set in a psychologically off-kilter art world full of grifters and con artists.
As relations between Lori and Julian thaw, the film becomes less a psychological thriller and more a meditative, theatrical dialogue between an old master and an arrested would-be apprentice that touches on issues of legacy and artistic permanence (or the lack thereof). McKellen and Coel have a prickly chemistry as the odd couple, not least because of the physical contrast between her angular bone structure and his rumpled, lined face, as well as the sharp deviation between her crisp, stingy customer-service voice and his sonorous, rambling one. (“You’re not allowed to,” she tartly replies to his query of whether he might ask about her relationship status, a closed door that forces him to try another route when she asks him why it’s relevant: “The relevance is that I’m curious.”) Nobody, as Julian cruelly points out, goes to art school–as Lori has–to become a restorer, and we soon learn that Lori’s longstanding beef with Julian stems from being inspired as a young artist by a work from his youth and then crushed in her teens by his curt dismissal of her own painting on that aforementioned show, which a warmer present-day Julian explains away as him “merely thinking about my next joke, while I was telling my last joke.” There’s real depth to the diverging aesthetic perspectives they bring to their partnership after the fallout from that revelation. Their scheme to torpedo the legacy of the Christopher series by maiming them with shoddy materials raided from a local art-supply shop, thus further disinheriting Julian’s talentless children, is riveting because it is anchored in real artistic differences about when a work is finished, who it’s for, and how credit even operates between artists and their subjects–not to mention a tenuous secondary network of appraisers, restorers, collectors, and forgers.
Savvy as The Christophers is as a narrative exploration of the nature of creativity and ownership (issues that Soderbergh will hopefully not lose sight of in his forthcoming embrace of generative A.I. as a tool), it’s flimsier as a position piece on criticism. Solomon’s script falls a little flat when Lori is called upon to play a perceptive, sharp-tongued art historian and critic herself, expounding on the true biographical meaning of Julian’s output during the lovesick period in which he painted the series. The film is anchored in far more interesting, trickier-to-navigate territory when it asks rather than answers questions concerning the nature of art, ownership, and curation, as in an ambivalent coda that feels like Soderbergh’s riff on the epilogue from The Brutalist, where the still-living but now non-verbal architect protagonist finds his oeuvre repositioned and appropriated by the political project of his niece. Whether Lori’s final cryptic act of programming–answered with an unexpected bit of counter-programming from Julian himself–sees her continuing to squat in Julian’s mindset or finally getting one of her own is left to the eyes of the beholder. And unlike Julian’s apparently lesser recent work, it’s worth the effort for us to puzzle over it.
