Steven Soderbergh’s The Christophers is a deliciously sly, twisty, darkly comedic take on the art world starring Ian McKellen who has never been better on film. (Let’s not mention 2023’s The Critic ever again.) The trouble with McKellen is that for some people (i.e., me) it’s hard not to always see Ian McKellen, but that’s not the case here.
Soderbergh is a big name (the Ocean’s trilogy, the Magic Mike trilogy, plus Traffic, Erin Brockovich and many more) but with this two-hander he’s gone small, pitting McKellen against Michaela Coel. She has the quieter role but more than holds her own. (I could look at the remarkable planes of her face all day.)
You can’t take your eye off either McKellen or Coel
McKellen stars as Julian Sklar, a once-brilliant painter who hasn’t produced anything in 30 years and has served as a Simon Cowell type figure on a reality talent show called Art Fight. He was vile to the amateur artists, but it was, he will maintain, worse for him. ‘I was the one who was tortured… I was waterboarded by a deluge of kittens.’ (The script by Ed Solomon is glorious.) To pay for his supper he has been reduced to recording Cameos at £149 a go while wearing a beret, which he appears to throw in for free.
He has two awful children, Sallie (Jessica Gunning) and Barnaby (James Corden), whom he calls ‘the harridan’ and ‘the dud’. No love lost there, then, but their awfulness isn’t his fault. ‘Blame their mothers, not me. I had nothing to do with them.’ They have their eye on his inheritance and, in particular, a series of unfinished portraits by him, called ‘The Christophers III’. Should they be completed and discovered after his death, they’d be worth a fortune. Paintings from the first two series have sold for millions. They hire Lori (Cole), an artist who has a sideline as a forger, to secretly complete the portraits. She agrees, as she hates Julian – although we don’t yet know why. She is currently working a food truck, so may also need the money even if she does dress divinely (I coveted her gorgeous leather backpack).
Julian lives in not one but two adjacent Georgian townhouses in, I think, London’s Fitzroy Square (do his children not realise that’s around £25 million, right there?). It’s where Lori presents herself, posing as his new assistant. At this point the drama could go any number of ways. It could go the way of As Good as It Gets, with a grumpy old man eventually thawing. Or it could go the way of a Patricia Highsmith thriller. But the truth comes out earlier than you might expect, which makes it far more interesting. Over a period of several days the pair mentally joust and the power shifts. Who was Christopher? Why does Lori hate Julian? Can fake art be true? It all comes out.
Whenever we’re in the cluttered house – which is most of the time – Soderbergh follows with a handheld. As a result the film is intimate and talky. It feels as if it could have originated as a stage play even if it didn’t. McKellen’s Julian is blistering. But we soon understand that beneath the endless bad-tempered bloviating lies a deeply lonely figure. Cole, playing the more reactive role, has everything going on behind those eyes. You can’t take your own eyes off either.
Does it all add up? Perhaps not. If the art world no longer cares about Julian, why would his work be worth millions? As for Sallie and Barnaby, they are such broad caricatures that it felt as if they’d been airlifted in from an entirely different film. But we’re here for McKellen and Cole and they deliver, amply.
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