Steven Soderbergh possesses a rare superpower, even among the most esteemed directors: the capacity to surprise. This restlessly productive filmmaker travels light creatively, developing eclectic projects with digital shooting, intimate locations, and invariably classy casts. His latest London-set movie is terrifically exhilarating and funny, as bracing as a large vodka and tonic before lunch: fast, literate, and witty, with a key plot progression handled elliptically and unsentimentally.
A Tale of Art and Attribution
The Christophers is a film about contemporary art and what Alan Bennett, in his play about Anthony Blunt, called “a question of attribution.” It breathes new life and wit into the perhaps tiresome subject of movies about value and worth. The story centers on Julian Sklar (Ian McKellen), an irascible, dyspeptic old English painter of the School of London variety. Once dominant, now outmoded and disliked, Julian lives solo in a chaotic bohemian townhouse in Bloomsbury, given to toweringly witty and cantankerous rants against everything that presents itself to his raddled senses.
An American Vision of Englishness
How has Soderbergh created a subversive turned reactionary Englishman so convincingly? The excellent screenplay comes from an American: Ed Solomons, son-in-law of John Cleese. Until now, I thought only Paul Thomas Anderson (Phantom Thread) and Robert Altman (Gosford Park) could fabricate haughty, echt Englishness. But Soderbergh and Solomons do it superbly well.
Coel’s Captivating Performance
Opposite McKellen, Michaela Coel is at the top of her game as Lori Butler, a charismatically self-controlled former art student fallen on hard times. Coel contains anger and passion within an opaquely polite and unreadable manner. She is hired as Julian’s assistant by his grasping adult children, Barnaby (James Corden) and Sallie (Jessica Dunning), figures of Dickensian mediocrity and greed whom Julian heartily dislikes. Lori finds Julian existing in squalor, recording Cameo videos for easy cash, having sold off inferior work in a roadside stunt. His tax bill has been bought off with an expensive painting hung in HMRC’s Whitehall offices, and the cruel TV reality show Art Fight, on which he was a judge, has long been cancelled.
The Hunt for The Christophers
Lori is instructed by the children to find a series of much-talked-about paintings Julian began showing in the 1990s while still a big name, then withdrew from sight and hid somewhere in the house: passionate studies of his then beautiful lover, Christopher, called “The Christophers.” The odious Barnaby and Callie believe these are the only things worth big money. Lori’s job is to find them and, if destroyed or unfinished, to forge similar works using her remarkable pastiche skills to pass them off as real once he’s dead. Radiating mystery, she may be Julian’s worst enemy, worst assistant, biggest fan, or closest ally.
Chemistry of the Year
McKellen is voluble, needling, vulnerable, and pathetic; Coel is calm and withholding. She jiujitsus his arrogant insults through her refusal to be baited, intuiting and articulating his decline more clearly than Julian dares, while also suggesting ways back he hadn’t guessed at. The double act of McKellen and Coel has the onscreen chemistry of the year. The Christophers is in UK and Irish cinemas from 15 May.
