The Christophers: Soderberg’s Latest Finds Michaela Coel and Ian McKellen in Dark Art World Comedy
By Liam Lacey
Rating: A
Director Steven Soderbergh’s latest brings his penchant for twisty con artist stories to a fresh dark comedy. The Christophers is a two-hander for a pair of terrific English actors of different ages and backgrounds.
Michaela Coel (I May Destroy You) plays Lori Butler, an artist who pays her rent with various side hustles, including an art blog, working a food truck, and occasionally forging paintings.
Ian McKellen plays Julian Sklar, a prickly, once-famous artist who has produced no worthwhile paintings in decades. He lives in a vastly cluttered five-story London double duplex, talking into his laptop to strangers, selling his name in Cameo-style video greetings to fans.
Those fans know him not as an artist but as the Simon Cowell-like mean judge on a former reality TV show called Art Fight, in which he heaped entertaining scorn on amateur painters.
The central con in the story involves Lori taking a job as Julian’s assistant. In reality, she is hired by Julian’s greedy son and daughter (James Corden and Jessica Gunning) to find and finish by forgery the last eight known paintings in a series known “The Christophers,” named after Julian’s onetime lover. The few completed works in the series have sold in the millions and the heirs plan to sell the forged paintings after Sklar’s death, making a fortune.
Writer Ed Solomon (No Sudden Move) has created a script that evokes a stage play (it echoes Anthony Shaffer’s Sleuth), featuring a psychological duel between the hyper-verbal, vain Julian and the quiet but deceptively layered Lori who, as played by Coel, reveals volumes in micro-shifts of her sculptural features, before letting loose with dazzlingly precise verbal ripostes to Julian’s provocations.
The Christophers is rewarding to anyone who enjoys the sheer pleasure of watching performers extend themselves, using the full resources of speech, gesture, and timing to play with our attention.
This could work perfectly as a stage play, but this is also, clearly, a distinctly Soderbergh film, who shot and edited the film under his usual pseudonyms. The handheld camera work is unobtrusively dynamic, following the characters up and down the stairs of Sklar’s messy warren, and often framing Lori, staring with an evaluative gaze at the disheveled Sklar as he flounces, pronounces, and provokes for his audience of one.
We soon learn that the watchful Lori, who was once inspired by Sklar’s work, may have an agenda entirely different from the job she was hired to do, as she comes to recognize her power to “revive or revise” Sklar’s patchy legacy.
Scenes outside the house involve Lori’s interactions with the two greedy heirs, who Sklar refers to as “the buzzard Barnaby” and “the hyena Sally.”
While various double-crosses and blackmail schemes tilt the balance back and forth, Corden and Gunning — as the bumbling, cartoonish fraudsters — are mostly there to earn laughs and even some sympathy for their truly awful parent. (“I had nothing to do with them!” Sklar protests.)
Most important, the rotten heirs serve to push Lori and Julian together into a kind of wary kinship, the kind of people who “get” art as opposed to those who don’t.
The Christophers is full of heady thumb-sucking questions about legacy, artistic expression and commerce, and reinvention, a subject Soderbergh knows well. This is far from blockbuster Soderbergh (Erin Brokovich, the Oceans trilogy, Magic Mike), but a return to the basics: A set, a mobile camera, a couple of terrific actors, and a story to explain what brings them there.
The Christophers. Directed by Steven Soderbergh. Written by Ed Solomon. Starring Michaela Coel, Ian McKellen, Jessica Gunning and James Corden. In theatres April 17.