The Christophers Puts an Unrepentant Art Monster Through His Paces
Art, it has been said, is never finished, only abandoned. Steven Soderbergh’s new film, The Christophers, works around the edges of this idea. Its story of an elderly, dying painter who’s declined to complete his masterpiece unfolds as a sly, invigorating game of lost and found.
The idea of a protean, veteran creator waiting out his own private exile is fascinating on its own terms; it deepens nicely in the context of Soderbergh’s intense—some might say pathological—relationship to his own process and prolificacy. Soderbergh has won an Oscar and a Palme d’Or, and his films have collectively made billions, but his true identity is as the contemporary Renaissance Man of American Cinema. Since his 1989 debut, Sex, Lies, and Videotape—an analog-era allegory of both the insatiable desire to create and the ethical consequences of getting behind the camera—he’s directed 38 features in 37 years, a pace that puts even industrious indie-bred contemporaries like Richard Linklater to shame.
The number becomes even more astonishing when one considers that Soderbergh “retired” from feature filmmaking for four years in the mid-2010s, citing a combination of burnout and disappointment with the diminished stature of his chosen medium. “I just don’t think movies matter anymore,” he told New York magazine in a 2013 interview that made international headlines. In addition to waxing philosophical (and more than a little cynical) about big-studio commercial calculus and waning mainstream attention spans, Soderbergh spoke extensively about his interest and inspiration from visual art; the interview was conducted in his painting studio near the Flatiron Building in New York City, a vivid backdrop for a chat that kept digressing into aesthetics.
“I go back and forth between portraits and abstracts,” he said of his paintings—though there is also a similar division in his cinematic oeuvre, with its share of intimate, close-up character studies (Erin Brockovich, The Informant!, Behind the Candelabra) and cool, distanced systemic analyses (Traffic, Contagion, High Flying Bird). But it’s another one of Soderbergh’s observations that seems to prefigure The Christophers. “When I think of a film I’m about to make,” Soderbergh mused, “I see a face with a certain expression on it.”
The expressions that Julian Sklar (Ian McKellen) paints in the film are, in a word, uncertain. In his series of portraits, also titled The Christophers, each frozen gaze is as enigmatic as a Mona Lisa smile. The identity of the model, the eponymous Christopher, is one of several mysteries woven through Ed Solomon’s screenplay—as is the question of how he felt about being placed on the canvas (and thus under a public microscope) by his lover. Solomon, whose mother is a painter, already owns a sweet little piece of film history as the brains behind the Bill and Ted movies, with their gloriously goofy, dudes-rock metaphysics. Here, working with Soderbergh for the fourth time in a decade, he shapes the material as a chamber drama: a two-hander whose protagonists spend most of the slender running time with their dukes up.
In one corner is the sacredly monstrous Julian, a mutant combination of living legend and cautionary tale, who has treated his own cancellation as a form of house arrest. Several years ago, Julian parlayed his celebrity into a talking-head spot on a reality show called Art Fight, a gig he treated, like most of his public appearances, with mercenary contempt. Now, having retired from the celebrity grind (and ceased painting), he huddles inside his house in London recording Cameo-style video messages to fans and haters at £149 a pop. “Happy birthday, stay in school … blah blah,” he blusters, his withered face haloed by a ring light.
His opponent is Lori Butler (Michaela Coel), who could be a Pulp lyric come to life: She studied art at Saint Martins College, where she was a prodigy, but is now reduced to sneaking sketches in between shifts slinging noodles at a Chinese food truck by the Thames. Lori’s precarious position makes her a likely collaborator for a scheme being hatched by her former classmate Sallie (Jessica Gunning), who happens to be Sklar’s estranged adult daughter (and, based on the available evidence, a lousy artist). She and her similarly aggrieved brother, Barnaby (James Corden), long to get their hands on whatever money Julian didn’t waste or fecklessly give away at the peak of his fame. Their plan is to have Lori audition to become the great man’s assistant, infiltrate his inner sanctum, and purloin a cache of eight unfinished Christophers, which she’ll finish off surreptitiously after his death. The future owners will be none the wiser, and of the millions of dollars of profit, one third will go to Lori. “You said this was a restoration job,” she offers coolly. “It’s a forgery.” “Really,” retorts Sallie. “Does it even matter?”
Well: Does it? Solomon and Soderbergh have staked the success of their film on the devilish, pleasurable complexity of that question. Soderbergh himself is an inveterate tinkerer who occasionally likes to recut films by himself and other directors; Ocean’s Eleven, Solaris, The Underneath, and Traffic are all remakes of a kind. How different is Lori’s mission? The character may not be a precise surrogate for her director, but her dilemma is right in his thematic wheelhouse. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, at least until it becomes a form of identity theft. Is it justifiable for a stifled creator denied entry to the gallery-industrial complex to play copycat as a means to an end? What does it mean, as Barnaby jokes during their brainstorming session, to literally forge a path toward success?
The Christophers doesn’t waste much screen time in introducing Julian, but the buildup is nevertheless effective. Tentatively ascending the stairs to her mark’s cavernous London flat, Lori could be seeking an audience with Picasso—or maybe Hannibal Lecter. That the reveal is worth the wait pivots on the masterstroke of casting McKellen, whose own pace has understandably slackened in his eighties; his last role in a major Hollywood film was as a grandiloquent senior feline in Cats, a victory-lapping cameo that rose slightly above the embarrassment of the film as a whole. Solomon gives one of the greatest living actors more to do, in a part that flits between playful loquaciousness and cutting bluntness. “Never get old,” Julian tells Lori upon her arrival, and the tone suggests that the wizened painter is talking mostly to himself. He’s monologuist by nature, and McKellen, whose great gift, whether as Richard III or Magneto, is a tragic flamboyance, ably sustains his logorrheic tour de force from beginning to end.
Coel’s role is arguably trickier. Where Julian seemingly can’t keep silent for even a second—he’s eager to weigh in on anything and everything, including the attributed and inebriated quotes on his Wikipedia page—Lori is obliged, both by the situation and her own temperament, to keep her cards close to the chest.
This aspect of Solomon’s script is slightly mechanical, but the gears grind smoothly because of Coel’s inverted performance style. While McKellen lets everything hang out, slouching around bare-chested in flowery housecoats and offering up amusing line readings, Coel makes a minor, galvanic spectacle of holding things in. It’s the same quality she projected as the writer-director-star of the BBC-HBO co-production I May Destroy You, where she played a writer dealing with the aftermath of sexual assault; her layered acting style and spectacularly angular features embody a sort of emotional cubism.
The first half of The Christophers is pressurized by Lori’s guilt and Julian’s suspicion. The latter comes to the fore in a wonderfully written scene where the older man pulls up an essay written by his new charge that not only inventories his bad behavior over the years but accuses him, in purplish prose, of “squatt[ing] on property unaffordable and hence uninhabitable for generations to come.” The comedy of McKellen’s delivery—the way Julian flatly etches each word like a knife in his back—only sharpens the larger critique of the entrenched hierarchies of the art world. Julian may resent being so dissected, but he can’t really argue with the diagnosis. Nor does he have much to say when Lori offers an empathetic, if brutal, assessment of the declining quality of The Christophers. She can see that Julian was in love with his subject, and also that his technique ebbed and flowed in sync with his feelings; by the end of the series, she notes pointedly, “the lightness was forced and the joy was a lie.”
The dynamic, combustible energy of two fine actors in conversation—and the elegant self-effacement of Soderbergh’s direction—gets The Christophers most of the way over the hump: It’s funny and absorbing and enjoyable. If the film doesn’t quite transcend its own small-scale conception, it’s less a failure of execution than a by-product of Soderbergh and Solomon’s reluctance to think too big, or score obvious rhetorical points off their subject matter. The ultimate evenhandedness with which the film treats Julian finds its most eloquent expression in a subtle but pointed detail near the end, when he tells Lori he’s thinking of mounting an exhibition of new work before he kicks the bucket. When he hands her the title scribbled on a piece of paper, she can’t tell if he’s written “Julian Sklar Revived” or “Julian Sklar Reviled.” “Exactly,” he replies. McKellen’s smile tingles with a wise, unsentimental kind of acceptance: not of complacency or equivocation, but the pleasurable contradictions—the unforced lightness and the true joy—from which art and artists are made. The final scene, meanwhile, wrings its own aching, humane variation on the maxim about art and abandonment; it suggests that even after we’re done, we’re never truly finished.