I’ve seldom thought of Steven Soderbergh as a sentimentalist. But if the director’s latest feature The Christophers, playing now in local theaters, is any indication, it’s an emotion he wears well.
Soderbergh’s third film in two years, The Christophers is set in London, where Lori Butler (Michaela Coel), a onetime striving artist, runs a small business as an art restorer while working at a food truck. She takes a call from an old schoolmate, Sallie Sklar (Jessica Gunning), who, with her brother Barnaby (James Corden), suggest an unusual, and highly unethical, assignment: Lori is to take a position as an assistant to their elderly and irascible father Julian (Ian McKellen), a painter of former renown, so as to access and complete a series of buried, unfinished, and priceless paintings from his peak period in the 1990s. These paintings are known as “The Christophers” for their depictions of Julian’s lover and muse. Julian suffers from a rare blood disorder, his days are few, and he’ll never know of the deception, his children attest.
Julian, whom McKellan embodies with the leonine gravitas of a mad Shakespearean king, has become something of a canceled crank. In his own words, he hasn’t “done shit for 30 years,” aside from brutally critiquing aspirants on an art competition series, and his income these days mostly derives from appearances on Cameo. But he’s an astute reader of human behavior, and it doesn’t take him long to realize Lori is hiding something; before long, they’re the ones who appear to be in cahoots against Julian’s unscrupulous offspring.
Penned by Ed Solomon, The Christophers is a talky film, and with its echoes of the artist-assistant power dynamic from the Tony-winning play Red, it feels like a piece that could have originated on the stage. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t cinematic, even if the technique is subtler than in the brazen innovations of Soderbergh’s early- and mid-career highlights. The director deploys focus shifts between his two protagonists as they feel each other out and our allegiances waver between them. He also blurs the corners of Julian’s cluttered, multistory apartment building, where most of the action takes place, slyly suggesting that a kind of objective truth is fuzzy, unclear, and anything but cut-and-dry, an artisanal choice for Solomon’s wry meditation on authorship.
In Julian, McKellan channels the agony of the artist, if not the ecstasy, and as his sparring partner-in-crime, Coel is unassailably cool under pressure. In their verbal pas de deux of revealing and withholding, they are a riveting pair to watch.
Most movies set in the art world are cutthroat satires or cynical takedowns of the crass commercialization of art. The Christophers acknowledges the latter but is after something purer and more humane. It bestows charity and forgiveness on just about everybody while still allowing its punches to linger.
The Christophers is playing now at Cinemark Bistro Boca Raton, Movies of Delray, Movies of Lake Worth and other area theaters.
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