Steven Soderbergh’s Strange, Surprising Heist Movie
Julian Sklar spends most of his workday performing on camera. Not for anyone important; the cantankerous artist (played by Ian McKellen), the protagonist of Steven Soderbergh’s new movie, The Christophers, is recording jokey Cameos for eager fans. Facing a ring-lit iPhone, he rambles about his fading career with chipper bumptiousness. Julian, the viewer quickly learns, is guarding a series of unfinished masterpieces in his house that he refuses to complete or sell, and his greedy children want their hands on his stash either way. His kids have thus concocted a scheme: Hire someone to work as their father’s assistant, secretly finish the paintings under his nose, and make a profit.
This being a Soderbergh movie, one might hear that premise and expect a caper—he directed Ocean’s Eleven (and two of its sequels), after all. He’s a master of the heist movie, and what Sklar’s useless kids, Barnaby (James Corden) and Sallie (Jessica Gunning), are engineering is a whimsical, intimate theft. They bring in an unheralded artist named Lori Butler (Michaela Coel), who says she can imitate Julian’s style enough to finish his famous collection of portraits: the Christophers, named after their mysterious young subject. But what distinguishes the movie is how quickly it abandons the initial stakes. As Lori entwines herself within Julian’s odd, crusty retired life, the film becomes something much deeper than the genre’s typical slick tale about a thief pulling off the job of the century; it becomes a meditation on the relationship between art and commerce.
The Christophers is Soderbergh’s most plainly emotional story in years—and he’s been pumping out many of late. Ever since the director came back from a self-proclaimed retirement with 2017’s Logan Lucky (an excellent heist film), he’s been working at a furious pace, usually on a small scale, and hopping from genre to genre with finessed ease. That stretch has included the horror-thrillers Unsane and Kimi, the crime drama No Sudden Move, the spy romance Black Bag, and the haunted-house movie Presence. The Christophers introduces itself as another indie spin on a familiar conceit, then heads in a much more empathetic direction than Soderbergh’s usual portrayal of burglars on the down-low.
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Coel, however, is the wild card. Where McKellen effortlessly conjures a warm presence, Coel has an incredibly distinctive on-screen manner that unsettles as much as it compels. (Her shattering work in I May Destroy You, as a woman repressing an emotional breakdown, comes to mind.) Lori seems to be a bit of a blank slate, both to Julian’s bumbling children and to Julian himself, who thinks Lori has been hired as his assistant to help manage his affairs and sort through the paintings littering his crumbling abode. He clocks that she’s an artist too, but not one who has ascended to celebrity status, as he had at her age; when he prattles on about his colorful past and opines about the contemporary art world’s descent into rubbish, she reacts impassively. McKellen can make a terrific meal out of just a few grunts and groans, spending whole scenes mumbling about nothing in particular; meanwhile, Coel comes across as impenetrable, yet alluringly so.
The playing field is leveled when, quickly enough, Julian realizes that Lori is interested in the Christophers. The set of portraits haunts Julian’s attic, sitting in an empty bathtub in their partial states. And so an endearing psychological dance starts to unfold between the two characters: Julian is insistent on destroying these works that his admirers around the world seem so interested in learning about, and Lori affects not caring about them at all. Her motivation for saving them, though, is more than just the money she might earn from finishing them herself—it’s cracking whatever secret Julian is guarding about why he doesn’t want anything to do with them anymore.
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Every time I thought I’d figured out the direction of the writer Ed Solomon’s script, The Christophers would make a surprising shift, tweaking the balance in Julian and Lori’s tête-à-tête or peeling back new layers to Lori’s intentions for embedding herself in Julian’s life. McKellen lands every snippy bon mot and backhanded compliment that Julian doles out, but Coel makes every crack in Lori’s facade really count, as the mystery behind her commitment to Julian unfurls. Julian’s shambling charm wears her down, the elder statesman challenging his younger peer’s view on their industry. The dynamic keeps the film from ever feeling too cramped or quiet, and the characters from ever being held at too far a remove.
It would be nice to see Soderbergh create on a larger scale again; he remains one of America’s most talented filmmakers, and his blockbusters always stood out amid Hollywood pablum. But it’s worth paying attention to his run of smaller efforts too, which allow him to play in many different sandboxes and show off what makes him so special as a director. As is typical of a Soderbergh production, The Christophers doesn’t waste an ounce of its limited resources; the director always knows exactly how to keep the viewer on the hook while allowing the story’s emotions room to breathe. The real heist of The Christophers is that Soderbergh snuck such a bittersweet tale into cinemas, dressed up as a silly caper.