The Christophers is in limited theatres on April 10 and opens nationwide on April 17.
It’s been over a decade since master-of-all-trades Steven Soderbergh turned out a straightforward drama: his 2013 Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra, just prior to his first “retirement.” In recent years, he’s returned to create a genre smorgasbord consisting of a COVID thriller, a spiffy spy flick, a sentimental stripper sequel and a haunted house movie from the spirit’s POV, which makes his latest, the art world drama The Christophers, seem entirely mundane on paper. However, Soderbergh’s tale of an aging painter and the ingénue trying to forge his work bubbles with the kind of excitement typical of the director’s heist films, like Logan Lucky or the Ocean’s Trilogy, despite being confined to two apartments and a pub. It also helps that it’s led by two of the finest performances you’re likely to see this year.
Written by Ed Solomon, The Christophers is a wonderfully intriguing (if occasionally unfocused) film that may also be Soderbergh’s most introspective. It follows the exploits of stagnating art school graduate Lori Butler (Michaela Coel), a noodle cart operator who’s hired by an old classmate to carry out a complicated con. The first step is getting a gig as a personal assistant to the ailing art world legend Julian Sklar (Ian McKellan), a brusque and controversial figure Lori once admired before his public “cancellation.” The second step? Covertly completing an unfinished series of Julian’s portraits known as the Christophers, which Lori’s secret benefactors — Julian’s ungrateful, bumbling children, Barnaby (James Corden) and Sallie (Jessica Gunning) — plan to sell upon his passing.
Which character has how much information about the other’s knowledge or intentions changes frequently throughout the runtime, ensuring constant subversions of power as the premise evolves. When Lori first meets Julian, he meekly records Cameo videos for adoring fans — seemingly his only source of income; he hasn’t sold a painting in years — but before long, Julian’s mischievous ego consumes the screen, when he decides he wants to dig up the Christophers himself, albeit in order to destroy them. Complications and suspicions ping-pong back and forth until, about halfway through the movie’s snappy 100 minutes, everyone’s cards are (more or less) on the table.
From there on out, The Christophers deepens in unexpected ways, changing focus to the dilemma of what actually makes an artist — and in that vein, what really constitutes arts criticism. Lori firmly believes she has a perfect handle on Julian’s methods and inspirations, but really, can she ever? In fact, could he? While Soderbergh initially approaches their dynamic at a wry remove, capturing McKellan’s inappropriate wit and Coel’s subdued reactions — often in the same wide frame — his camera finally ventures closer once these central queries turn inward, forcing both leads to take a long, hard look at themselves.
Although it’s slightly disappointing that The Christophers is not a film of process — despite threatening to become one multiple times — Soderbergh’s conception of his central characters remains entirely lucid. We may not have any insight into Julian’s actual artwork (which we rarely glimpse) or Lori’s meticulous counterfeiting, but the things that drive them, hold them back, and make them change their tune towards one another multiple times are often crystal clear. This is owed in part to the beguiling mystery Coel creates as Lori both draws hard professional lines with Julian while trying to win his trust, and to McKellan’s hidden vulnerabilities as a man whose wisdom comes buried beneath repulsive (and often hilarious) verbal instincts.
Everything about Julian makes him seem like a pain, from the way he makes guests use a different door to his building each time he buzzes them in, to his insistence on sexualizing conversations, or sarcastically discussing the ethics of doing so. Julian, like McKellan, is a queer icon, but he’s fallen victim to the generational gap — perhaps intentionally, since it allows him to be a martyr instead of focusing on new work. Alongside Bill Condon’s crime thriller The Good Liar, The Christophers is some of McKellan’s best and most considered late-career work, in which he turns his ostentatious, stage-like affectations into a mask for his character’s insecurities.
On the other end of the performance spectrum lies Coel’s quieter, more measured conception, as though she were reading from an entirely different text. This isn’t a bad thing; her subdued naturalism, coupled with her mysteriously feline features, makes the audience watch in anticipation in the very same moments that Julian’s boastful obnoxiousness might push them away. Lori has her own, secret motives that are meted out slowly as the film goes on. But in combination with McKellan’s livewire performance, she becomes a lightning rod of sorts, grounding Julian’s late-stage crisis in a number of emotional considerations that are either immediately obvious or, on the other hand, require several scenes of emotional context before arriving like major plot twists.
This is not to suggest The Christophers is the kind of movie you can “spoil,” but gradually discovering what makes Lori tick says just as much about her as it does about Julian’s celebrity stature, and about the fragile relationship between artists and the people who admire their work. Perhaps Soderbergh and Solomon each have their own Lori out there — a muse, an adversary, or some combination of the two — but it’s more likely that both men, now in their sixties, have reached such a point of artistic maturity and lifelong reflection that they can’t help but consider what it might all mean in the grand scheme of things. Lori is certainly her own person, made of flesh and blood, but she’s also an abstraction meant to draw out Julian’s worst impulses, as well as his most revealing.
We may not fully get to know Julian by the time the credits roll, but the question of how much he even knows himself is, by the closing salvo, entirely inescapable. It’s the kind of exclamation point an elderly master might create in their twilight years as they look back on their career, but Soderbergh likely has years (if not decades) ahead of him, making The Christophers an earlier-than-expected destination, beyond which can only lie exciting possibilities. Now that he’s taken a long, hard look in the mirror, where on Earth will he go next?
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