Steven Soderbergh’s latest feature, “The Christophers,” is about a master painter who is dying without having completed a legendary series of unfinished portraits, and the young artist hired by the painter’s children to “complete” the works so they can be auctioned for millions of dollars. Ian McKellen is stunningly good as the older painter, Julian Sklar, a 1960s Swingin’ London sensation who has aged into a decrepit caricature of himself. He rarely leaves his London home, which is actually two side-by-side townhouses: one a domicile, the other a studio. He’s now known mainly for his paid appearances on a Cameo-like platform and his stint as a judge on Art Fight, a competition show where professionals judge amateurs.
The art world no longer cares about Julian’s work, save for “The Christophers,” three series of portraits of a beautiful young man whom you can tell was his lover just by how the artist sees him. A rumored third exists, and aficionados of the others hope they’ll someday be seen. Julian’s forty-something children from his closeted years, Barnaby and Sallie (James Corden and Jessica Gunning), ask young painter Lori Butler (Michaela Coel) to finish, i.e. forge, the third series and sell it. They see this scheme as a way of compensating themselves for Julian’s bad parenting.
Sallie knows Lori as a classmate in the Saint Martin’s College art program. Lori got in on merit, but Sallie was a nepo admission, as proved by a university-era painting that weirdly evokes the 2012 amateur “restoration” of a fresco of Jesus. Lori, however, is the real deal—a respected blogger on fine art and a technically brilliant craftsperson who can mimic anyone’s style. Years earlier, she was a contestant on Art Fight, where Julian was mean to her. Sallie includes that in her pitch to Lori: this is a way to belatedly avenge her humiliation. But Julian seems not to recognize Lori as a target from the TV show, probably because he’s insulted so many people that they all blur together in his mind.
Lori has been running a food truck since her art restoration business failed and needs money, so she agrees to participate in the siblings’ plan. First, they’ll pressure their father to hire Lori as his personal assistant to help him organize his daily life and get his affairs in order. Once Lori has gained Julian’s trust, she’ll convince him to move his work into a storage facility so she can secretly “finish” the incomplete Christophers, setting the stage for their posthumous “discovery.”
The gamesmanship and storytelling verve displayed here are as assured as we’ve come to expect from Soderbergh, but his virtuosity never eclipses the people whose personalities drive the action. The characters in his movies can be emotionally or physically brutal, but the movies themselves rarely are. In this one, he and screenwriter Ed Solomon care about people the way Jane Goodall cared about primates: mainly as subjects of observation. There’s affection in how they look at the characters, but it’s not as important as the perceptive observations they make about their behavior.
Nobody’s entirely unsympathetic—not even Barnaby and Sallie, materialists who’ve already churned through the fortune they made from selling other work by their father. The movie recognizes that the siblings’ means of seeking redress for psychic injuries their father inflicted is not just criminal but cowardly—a way to “win” while avoiding the agony of a confrontation. But the undercurrent of childlike pain and disappointment in Corden and Dunning’s performances makes you realize they’re right to feel that something precious was denied to them, because it was.
What, exactly, drives Lori, though? There’s the promise of money, at least initially. And there’s curiosity about the private life of an artist she once looked up to—and then, as an online art critic, saw through. With the greatest admiration for other aspects of “The Christophers,” it must be said that the white characters, even when exaggerated to the brink of caricature, seem to have interior lives, while Lori, the film’s sole Black lead, is often opaque. She comes off as more a vehicle to bring us inside the Sklar family’s world than a layered, grounded character. The result its reminiscent of how many of the Black characters were rendered on “Mad Men”: as a dramatic chorus bearing witness to white entitlement.
This misstep doesn’t destroy the movie. Coel’s understated intensity and subtle way of conveying emotions without words go a long way towards filling out the character. She’s 100% believable as a woman who can keep her eyes on the prize and wave off Julian’s bluster and bad-boy posturing. But it seems as if we’re meant to be satisfied with Lori as a woman of few words who keeps her own counsel: a bit of a blank slate, but mesmerizing. Which is to say, a character with dignity and strength and conflicted morality, but not one you’ll think back on often, and fondly—at least, not in the same delighted way you will Julian, who blends aspects of Lucian Freud; Truman Capote; Peter O’Toole’s charming reprobate in “My Favorite Year”; and Lord Goring in “An Ideal Husband,” who drops aphorisms like, “Fashion is what one wears oneself. What is unfashionable is what other people wear. Other people are quite dreadful.”
”I was once in a throuple,” Julian quips to Lori, “back when it was called infidelity.” Later, after surprising Lori by telling her he’s read her art blog, he advises, “Never underestimate the Internet prowess of a man who has spent decades Googling himself.” Your mileage will vary on other aspects of “The Christophers,” but there’s no denying the appeal of Ian McKellen delivering one of Solomon’s gloriously ornate monologues while Soderbergh frames him in closeup. Simple pleasures like these are why movies were created.
