Steven Soderbergh loves a heist narrative, and his latest feature, The Christophers, starts like one. But it’s not so simple. It’s about a struggling artist named Lori Butler, who occasionally moonlights as an art forger, and a cantankerous painter named Julian Sklar, who has only grown crankier in his twilight years.
A mythic quality has grown around a series of unfinished Sklar paintings known as the Christophers, portraits of a man he once loved. No one has seen them, but everyone has theories about them. Lori (Michaela Coel) has been hired by Sklar’s money-grubbing adult children (played in hammy performances by James Corden and Jessica Gunning) to be their father’s personal assistant. She’s to find the fabled Christophers and secretly finish them so they can be auctioned after Sklar’s death.
Sir Ian McKellen plays Sklar in a wonderfully garrulous and brambly performance. He lives in a London flat stuffed with artifacts from a long career. He doesn’t paint anymore and has distanced himself from the art world — and, for that matter, from society itself. Here’s a man who has garnered controversy for his remarks, who has sold his paintings on the sidewalk outside his home, who once commissioned a work called “Anyone Can Do This and Call It Art,” who regularly tells young artists to just give up.
Lori does eventually discover the unfinished Christopher paintings: Sklar doesn’t want to confront what they represent, both in his life and his career, but he also doesn’t want to let them go.
But there are surprises in this story, because Lori and Sklar see through each other almost instantly, and because they turn out to have an unexpected history. The screenplay is by Ed Solomon, best known for bug-eyed, high-concept comedies like Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and Men in Black. His approach here is much more low-key, droll and observational, much like his script for Soderbergh’s terrific neo-noir No Sudden Move.
He has also written long passages of dialogue for McKellen and Coel, and the contrasts in their performances are the most enjoyable part of The Christophers. They’re like wildly incongruous paintings hanging side by side in a gallery. McKellen is at his most bellicose, finding a tone that’s somewhere between Peter O’Toole’s boozy actor in My Favorite Year and his own turn as reclusive filmmaker James Whale in Gods and Monsters. Coel, meanwhile, has a stillness about her that’s both playful and a little unsettling.
I wish the movie had as sharp an eye for art as it does for these two actors. We never really understand what once made Sklar a great artist; we understand the motivations behind it, but Soderbergh gives us little feeling for his technique or style.
But The Christophers does work, if you back away and squint at it, as a portrait of Soderbergh the artist. He’s a filmmaker who’s always changing the look and feel of his movies, and who once kept working through his own self-imposed retirement. Maybe he sees himself in both Lori Butler and Julian Sklar: one an artistic chameleon, able to inhabit any style, the other a restless spirit who can’t resist the siren song of creation.
Nathan Weinbender is a co-host of Spokane Public Radio’s Movies 101, heard Friday evenings at 6:30 and Saturday afternoons at 2 on SPR News.