We’ve all praised Steven Soderbergh’s diversity. Each year, he seems to deliver one movie that is vastly different from anything else he’s done, such as putting out the ghost story Presence and the spy film Black Bag within months. But can we spare some of those plaudits for screenwriter Ed Solomon, whose incredible versatility has given us films as varied as Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Men in Black, Now You See Me, and Soderbergh’s No Sudden Move. It’s impossible to predict what either of them will do next, but if they keep giving us movies as surprising, funny, and insightful as art world drama The Christophers, let’s hope they never split up.
The Christophers is essentially a two-hander, so much so that I’d be shocked if it weren’t turned into a play someday. It stars the inexhaustible Ian McKellen as Julian Sklar, a masterful painter who set the art world on fire in the 1960s. A series of gorgeous paintings, known as “The Christophers”, of a young man that Julian clearly loved, sold for millions of dollars. Now, an aging man in his 80s, Julian’s recent painting aren’t selling and even if they do, not for much. He’s mostly known for the paid messages of inspiration that he delivers on a Cameo-esque service, or for his appearances as a Simon Cowell-like judge on Art Fight, a TV show competition where artists gets scrutinized. Julian mostly stays indoors in his overstuffed, shabby London home, which is actually two townhouses smooshed together, one place to work and another to live.
The tone of The Christophers is like an Ocean’s 11-style heist caper, something Soderbergh is obviously quite familiar with. But it’s actually a story about legacy, not just what we leave behind in our chosen field, but as people, as parents. The story gets going when Julian’s money-grubbing children (played by Jessica Gunning and James Corden) hire art critic and restorer Lori Butler, played by Michaela Coel, to complete eight of his unfinished sketches so they can pass them off as the third series in “The Christophers” to sell for millions.
Lori is reluctant. She’s got some pretty strong feelings about Julian, and a past encounter that he certainly doesn’t remember. In fact, his kids use this to convince Lori to worm her way into Julian’s life as an assistant. The plan is to then find the sketches, steal them, and then finish them in his style A low-key art forger, Lori is more than capable of mimicking Julian’s famous brush strokes.
Julian doesn’t make things easy, though. The interview for the job is mostly him huffing and puffing about how much he hates the art business now, how it’s turned commercial, how it no longer appreciates him. At one point he started selling his paintings on street corners, which was a middle finger to art dealers but perhaps also recognition that his work no longer belonged in a gallery. Whatever the case, Julian’s cynical nature has made him volatile, and he throws a curveball at Lori when he demands that the unfinished sketches be burned, destroyed forever.
There are twists and turns everywhere in The Christophers, along with double-crosses, secret agendas, and revenge plots. The art world is cutthroat, and certainly everyone in The Christophers are, too, in their own way. But none of them are treated as truly horrible people, even as they lie, blackmail, and manipulate one another repeatedly. Soderbergh and Solomon see their characters as fully-formed, fleshed out human beings with layers so deep their motivations might not even be clear to them. Everyone is, in their own way, looking for respect, authorship, or credibility. Nothing is colored in flat blacks and whites, but a full, colorful palette of emotions.
McKellen is a livewire as Julian Sklar, racing up and down flights of stairs, boasting loudly at the top of his lungs. Meanwhile, Coel is a perfect opponent as Lori, whose reserved and rational retorts cut through Julian’s bluster with the precision of a master painter’s brushstroke. The Christophers is compact, elegant brilliance, the work of two cinematic artists at the top of their games.
The Christophers opens nationwide on April 17th via NEON.
