It’s tempting to think of painting as existing in a rarefied world of galleries and muses and pure genius, undiluted by crass commercial concerns. But poke your nose inside the fine art world for a moment and the truth tumbles out: Few fields are more freighted with pecuniary concerns. Art’s value rises and falls based on factors barely related to the work itself. The price can be manipulated by savvy operators. Being financially successful as an artist requires a lot of luck, a lot of talent or a lot of canny playing of the game.
That’s probably what attracted the director Steven Soderbergh to Ed Solomon’s screenplay for “The Christophers,” a sparkling, funny, wise movie about two painters, both of whom consider themselves failures. Soderbergh rarely writes his own movies, but nearly every movie he makes is about how money manipulates all aspects of our lives: relationships, sports, technology, mental health, body image, even sex. And now, with “The Christophers,” he dips into that most human of all matters: art.
The two painters at the center of this movie are Julian Sklar (a spectacular Ian McKellen) and Lori Butler (an equally terrific Michaela Coel). Julian is in his twilight years, his great work decades behind him, and he lives in a pair of adjoining rowhouses in London full of the detritus of a life, if not well lived, then at least definitely lived. He records multiple Cameos per day to keep the bank account full — we soon find out what accounts for this level of fame — and tosses off witticisms. He’s a crank, and sometimes a despicable one, but the sort you kind of love.
He also despises his two children, Barnaby (James Corden) and Sallie (Jessica Gunning), who are eager to put some kind of windfall in place for when their father kicks the bucket, which they’re sure will happen any day now. Sallie went to art school with Lori, who has been working as a freelance art restorer, among other things, in the years since graduation. The Sklar offspring hatch a plan: Lori will get hired as their father’s assistant and will “forge through” a series of “The Christophers,” the paintings that made Julian famous. They’re portraits from decades ago of a beautiful young man with whom Julian had clearly fallen in love, and others in the series are worth millions at auction. An undiscovered series, discovered in the attic after Julian’s death, would surely be worth the same. And they know Lori can do it.
She doesn’t want to, for reasons that have to do with more than just the forgery part. But she needs the money. She goes for a strange interview with the garrulous Julian, full of non sequiturs: “I was bisexual, Lori, when it actually cost you something to be so — are you any good with humidifiers?” She hangs on for dear life, and he hires her on the spot, and thus begins a partnership that starts out combative and turns into something far more interesting. Julian and Lori poke and prod at each other’s deepest psychic bruises and challenge each other’s ideas about creativity and originality. It is as if they are circling around the meaning of art itself.
I have rarely enjoyed watching two actors’ rapport the way I loved watching McKellen and Coel; it could have gone on forever and not been long enough. Two more different and yet more fascinating faces are hard to imagine: McKellen’s blue eyes and soft, craggy face against Coel’s dark brown eyes and sky-high cheekbones. The way they listen to and play off one another has a way of reminding you just how nonreactive so much acting is. These characters could so easily be types — the disillusioned, bitter young assistant; the pompous, bitter old artist, the young one there to facilitate the older one’s self-discovery or vice versa. But that’s not this movie at all. They’re two real people living two real lives, both so authentic that I half expect to see a Julian Sklar retrospective in a list of this spring’s exhibitions, curated by Lori Butler.
“The Christophers” fills in both characters’ back stories slowly, but especially Julian’s. He’s an artist cast from a particular mold, the kind who came up when artists like him mingled with every other sort of celebrity and became household names. (He refers in passing to “Ringo,” then jokes, perhaps, to Lori that it’s not the Ringo she’s thinking of — “this one was French.”) The walls of his home (marvelously designed by Antonia Lowe) are covered in posters and pictures of him and other famous faces, but those days are long gone, and the decades since have been filled with a series of small indignities, little moments of selling out, or pretending not to. Now, he is mostly consumed with whether anyone will remember him.
But Lori, born decades later, has mostly known a world where selling out was a given to keep body and soul together. When we meet her, after all, she’s answering her mobile phone with the name of her restoration business, but she’s on lunch break from her job at a food truck. She lives in her painting studio. The kind of splendor that Julian experienced is, to her, probably never going to be an option. Even if she were to show her work, the art world doesn’t work for her the way it did for him.
That’s the quiet undercurrent in “The Christophers,” in which nepo babies and tech bros and unscrupulous gallerists are all present in the background somewhere. What people who live adjacent to art want from it isn’t always art. If money makes the world go round, it makes the art world go round too; it is the ever-present force that pushes the paintbrush around the canvas. But the truth is that anyone can make money. It takes a real artist to make art.
The Christophers Rated R largely for salty language. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters.
Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005.
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