The aging painter Julian Sklar (Ian McKellen) of Steven Soderbergh’s The Christophers is introduced recording cameos, donning a beret for the occasion and signing off each time by drawing his autograph in the air, as if signing a painting, a flourish that costs each Cameo customer an extra hundred quid. A work of art is worth more when signed by a famous artist, even if the signature is invisible — an apt throwaway joke in a film concerned with a plot to forge eight of Sklar’s unfinished canvases, down to the authenticating signature in the bottom corner.
Such satisfying thematic assonances are typical of Ed Solomon’s screenplay, which Soderbergh filmed in London earlier this year, around the time of the release of the London-shot Black Bag, with a crackerjack script by old pro and new Soderbergh go-to David Koepp. Black Bag was Soderbergh and Koepp’s third collaboration since the pandemic, as The Christophers is Soderbergh and Solomon’s third, following No Sudden Move and the miniseries Full Circle. The growing implication is that there are plenty of proficiently constructed screenplays out there, full of snappy dialogue, rhyming subplots, and airtight plotting, turnkey properties ready to be turned into mid-budget entertainments for mainstream adult audiences, and Soderbergh is willing to direct them all, if necessary, if no one else will.
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Sklar is the fallen idol of Lori Butler (Michaela Coel), a former painter, sometime art restorer and struggling gig worker introduced sketching at the Tower of London, then jumping back into a food truck to serve a waiting tourist. (Such efficient exposition, which introduces the character and establishes her motivation in two shots, is the kind of problem-solving that absorbs Soderbergh.) He was once a swaggering Lucian Freud type, flipping off the establishment and belatedly running afoul of cancel culture. Bisexual before it was fashionable (his phrasing), he was eventually reduced to the role of cruel and catty Simon Cowell type on a competition called Art Fight, but before that, around the time he came out, he produced his last significant work, a series of intense and sensual portraits of a male muse. Known as “The Christophers”, the paintings sell for millions at auctions to the new art-world commodity traders in Russia, China, and the crypto world, and Lori is enlisted by Sklar’s bickering failkids played by Jessica Gunning and a nicely entitled James Corden, to gin up one last windfall. (There used to be nine unfinished Christophers in Sklar’s attic, but their own attempts to finish it in their father’s style came out like Cecilia Giménez’s “Ecce Homo”). After all, they remind Lori, studio assistants such as herself make uncredited contributions to their masters’ work all the time.
What follows is something like a Soderbergh heist film, in which the game is implant rather than extract the loot, but similarly concerned with deception, shifting alliances, and psychological cat-and-mouse as information is revealed and concealed and McGuffins change hands. Much of the movie is a two-hander contained within Sklar’s conjoined townhouses, where Coel and McKellen challenge each other from across the generation gap on the nature of creativity, skimming along the surface of debates about mentors and proteges, authorship and influence, creators and audiences, as intelligible and intellectually stimulating as a well-made play.
McKellen makes a feast of a verbose and expansive part, holding forth with a Lear bass rumble catching on wet lungs. Sklar wears scarves, chore coats and designer sweaters, a hip wardrobe (I think some pieces came from Toast) undercut slightly by the telltale track pants on the bottom half — no belts to fasten. (Some days he prefers a dressing gown, unbelted; when Lori objects, he grouses that “Weinstein ruined the robe for the rest of us.”) His requests for aide imply more wounded pride than solicitousness — he imperiously informs Lori, as if stating an objective fact, that it’s been recommended he not carry anything heavy. As Sklar probes suggestively at Lori’s personal life, dismisses the hackwork of his lesser rivals and the vapidity of the art market, and fulminates about past and present betrayals, frantically blowing hot air at the dying embers of his creativity, the grand old thesp projects the blowsy vainglory of an aging bohemian, as if Sunset Blvd. had been transposed to Soho.