Retirement seems to have been treating Steven Soderbergh well; since he first mooted his withdrawal from film-making in 2012 — resulting in a four-year hiatus — he’s made at least one film a year since 2017. His return, however, has seen quite a different output, even for a director who came out swinging as a quicksilver talent, investigating genre after genre but never quite settling on one or another. God knows what happened in those missing years, but, with the exception of Magic Mike’s Last Dance, Soderbergh 2.0 seems to be heading in a much more personal and determinedly eccentric direction — there is seemingly no throughline that takes us here from his “comeback” (2017’s heist movie Logan Lucky) to now. Or even from his last film, just a few months ago, the spy thriller Black Bag, which is similar only inasmuch as it takes place entirely in London.
On the surface, The Christophers would appear to be another heist movie, albeit a much more ambiguous kind than his Ocean’s trilogy and also a lot smaller in scope, with a cast of just four main players in a very idealized but never unrecognizable London. In that respect, it could be an homage to Soderbergh’s hero Richard Lester’s early output, which anticipated — and perhaps even invented — the “Swinging London” years and mythologized the British capital’s swankier neighborhoods in a way that Richard Curtis would later turn into outright property porn with Notting Hill. (Happily, this film does not do that.)
The heist here, though, is far from the simple in-and-out jobs of Soderbergh’s previous and more famous genre movies. It begins with artist and restoration specialist Lori (Michaela Cole) being approached by an old college friend and her brother with a very specific job. Their bohemian father, Julian Sklar (Ian McKellen), is a famous artist, seemingly on death’s door, and his best years are long behind him. However, he still has an unfinished series of portraits that the art world is clamoring for: The Christophers, as they are known.
Knowing Lori’s sketchy background as a sometime art forger, Sklar’s adult children Sallie and Barnaby (Jessica Gunning and James Corden) offer her a proposition: If they hire her as the old man’s assistant, and give her access to the artworks, will she finish them in his style? Lori balks at the idea but is tempted by the money. “We know why you hate him,” says Barnaby, and the siblings pitch the project as “a chance for revenge”. (This exchange is a bit of a misdirect, since, as we will later find out, Lori’s opinion of Sklar is a very complex thing.) But Lori takes the job anyway, for reasons we don’t question but never quite fathom, and yes, after a very bad start, the odd couple, rather predictably start to spark. At which point Lori confesses all, and Sklar, impressed by her candor, comes round to the plan, which he fully intends to sabotage. With Lori’s blessing.
From here it gets a little uneven, even though Ed Solomon’s screenplay tries hard to serve both actors’ strengths equally. McKellen is just perfect as the trailblazing art star of the ’60s and ’70s who shocked society, and his wife and kids, when he came out as gay (“I was in a throuple back when it was merely called infidelity,” he says mournfully). And Michael Coel should be perfect too; the I May Destroy You star has just the right attitude and delivery to offset the broader comedy of the piece. Somehow, though, we don’t get into Lori’s head in the same way that we do into Julian’s, most notably in the poignant scenes in which he reveals the true meaning of the Christopher paintings and why he never finished them.
Perhaps because it’s a Soderbergh film, there’s an expectation that there will be some sort of twist, but the twist here is that there isn’t really a twist. Perhaps because he leads a very-close-second life as an artist, Soderbergh genuinely seems more interested in the questions that the story raises about art; the main one being this: if an artist takes part in his own forgery, is it forgery? The secondary questions it touches on are about personality in art; is it right to dismiss the artworks along with the artist once they’ve fallen from grace, and, quite the opposite, should we tolerate terrible work from an artist in clover? Sklar is an interesting character, a pop-art relic now bordering on alt-right, certainly inappropriate, and banned from his local art supplies shop for reasons we’ll never know or understand. Lori, though, remains an enigma right through to the end.
Nevertheless, it’s an unusually emotional film for Soderbergh, and that’s what lasts; Sklar and Lori are two very different individuals brought together by a mutual and passionate interest in the exact same thing, a bond that even transcends Sklar’s relationship with his own offspring, much to their horror (“The Buzzard” and “The Hyena” he calls them). That said, it will also strike a chord with anyone who is not so enamored with the fakery of the art world, notably when Sklar reckons the worst art in the world to be “dogs playing poker — and all of Warhol”. It’s a tricky subject for sure, and that it works at all is down to McKellen, always game and here leaning valiantly into his mortality at the age of 86. As we know from his performance in the dire Da Vinci Code, he’s an actor who gives everything his all, no strings attached. It may be a little opaque in its messaging, but The Christophers is a film that’s worthy of that trust.
Title: The ChristophersFestival: Toronto (Special Presentations)Director: Steven SoderberghScreenwriter: Ed SolomonCast: Michaela Coel, Ian McKellen, Jessica Gunning, James CordenSales agent: CAARunning time: 1 hr 47 mins
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