Steven Soderbergh possesses a certain superpower not always granted to even the most prominent directors: the ability to surprise. This restlessly productive filmmaker travels light creatively, developing eclectic projects, shooting on digital, using intimate locations, and extracting the very best from an invariably classy cast. Having recently found himself in the UK, his latest London-set movie is terrifically exhilarating and funny, as bracing as a large vodka and tonic before lunch: fast, literate, and humorous, with a key plot progression elliptically and unsentimentally managed.
A Tale of Art and Attribution
The Christophers is a movie 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. An irascible, dyspeptic old English painter named Julian Sklar, wonderfully played by Ian McKellen, is a once-dominant but now outmoded and disliked artist of the School of London variety. He 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.
How has Soderbergh created a subversive turned reactionary Englishman so convincingly? The excellent screenplay is by an American: Ed Solomons, who happens to be the son-in-law of John Cleese. Until this moment, I had thought that Paul Thomas Anderson with Phantom Thread and Robert Altman with Gosford Park were the only Americans able to fabricate haughty, echt Englishness. But Soderbergh and Solomons do it superbly well too.
Michaela Coel's Masterful 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 as she is hired as Julian's assistant by his grasping adult children, Barnaby (James Corden) and Sallie (Jessica Dunning). The latter pair are heartily disliked by Julian himself, figures of Dickensian mediocrity and greed. Lori finds Julian existing in squalor, recording Cameo videos for easy cash; he has sold off his recent, inferior work in a roadside stunt and has no other income. His tax bill has been bought off with an expensive painting of his hung in the HMRC's Whitehall offices, and the cruel TV reality show called Art Fight on which he was a judge, humiliating pathetically eager contestants, has long since been cancelled.
Lori is under instructions from the children to find a series of much-talked-about paintings that Julian began showing in the 1990s while he was still a big name but then withdrew from sight and hid somewhere in the house. These are passionate studies of his then beautiful lover, Christopher, called 'The Christophers.' The odious Barnaby and Sallie figure that The Christophers are the only things worth the big money for them; Lori's job is to find them and, if they are destroyed or unfinished, to forge similar works using her remarkable pastiche skills so they can pass them off as real once he's dead. Radiating mystery, she may be Julian's worst enemy, his worst assistant, biggest fan, or closest ally.
Chemistry and Conclusion
McKellen is voluble, needling, vulnerable, and pathetic; Coel is calm and withholding. She jiujitsus his arrogant insults against him through her refusal to be baited, intuiting and articulating his decline more clearly than Julian himself dares – but also suggests ways back that 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.
