The Christophers holds back from showing us Ian McKellen’s Julian Sklar in his full glory. Still, we know it’s the actor the moment Lori Butler (Michaela Coel) walks through his door. We can hear that thunderous, melodious voice of his bouncing off the walls, filling up every particle of air in the place. It’s that voice that’s woven itself deep into modern culture, in McKellen’s blood-hot, dexterous handling of Richard III, Gandalf, or X-Men’s Magneto. It’s all-encompassing in that way.
And it’s put to beautiful use in The Christophers, Steven Soderbergh’s equally entertaining follow-up to last year’s double punch of Presence and Black Bag. These films share a fascination with narrative efficiency. While that’s true of Soderbergh’s entire filmography, it’s especially relevant to the work he’s done since “retiring” over his frustrations with the industry. They’re lean meat through and through, but feel outsized in their conceptual ambition, sex appeal, and emotional intimacy.
There’s barely an intake of breath before events are set in motion. Lori, an art restorer with a side hustle in art forgery, is hired by Julian’s disgruntled children (James Corden and Jessica Gunning) to complete his most famous series, “The Christophers”: two sets of portraits of an old love, whose shifts in style, from effusive to detached, chart a relationship on canvas. Julian has barely worked since then, his imagination dried up and his reputation collapsed under a provocative persona.
Lori, a former admirer, experienced the curdling effect, too. She takes the job not only for a third of any sale money (the kids are convinced their dad will die soon and they can “discover” the new Christophers in the attic), but as an elaborate form of vengeance against a disappointing man who now lives in a double townhouse in central London while she works a second (third?) job out of a food van.
When she turns up to his house, under the guise of his new assistant, no one’s in doubt about the power dynamics at play. But Ed Solomon’s script (this is his second collaboration with Soderbergh after 2021’s No Sudden Move) is too deftly constructed to plough through the usual debates around cancel culture or parasocial relationships – they’re all there, but the real fascination is in what lies beneath them: the more delicate considerations of the extent to which art reveals the truth of a person, and whether we can ever fully reckon with the gulf between the two.
Soderbergh seems just as curious about the answers, and his camera hovers eagerly like a third body in the room, crouched behind bits of furniture or stood unobtrusively off to the side. If that observer ever had anything to say, I doubt Julian would let them. McKellen’s work here is his best since his Gandalf days, reinterpreting the elder artist into a mad king, fuelled and decimated by his own ego.
He’s an endless torrent of pronouncements and unwarranted advice. His orthopaedist, he says, “smells of radishes”. He was “bisexual when it actually cost you something to be so”. He’s not responsible for his own children – “Blame their mothers, not me. I had nothing to do with them.” But McKellen summons the secret effort behind such recklessness, walls built only to collapse at such speed that he’s starting to lose his breath.
The role was written for him, as Lori was for Coel, with that ability of hers to project mental calculation on screen (also used to great effect in the recent pop-star drama Mother Mary). Her sense of clarity keeps the momentum up in a film that, in its most reductive form, is mostly a young woman listening to an old man jabber. She’ll interject with an affirmation or a curt comment here or there, and move the action on to the next step.
But, when she really opens up, and analyses Julian’s work in front of him, it’s a formidable moment – suddenly, we see that she sees Julian’s vulnerability splattered all over the canvas. I wonder how much Soderbergh connects to the material there. He’s a filmmaker who almost moves too fast to be known. But I’m certain there’s a piece of his soul in The Christophers, if you look hard enough.
Dir: Steven Soderbergh. Starring: Ian McKellen, Michaela Coel, James Corden, Jessica Gunning. Cert 15, 100 minutes.
‘The Christophers’ is in cinemas from 15 May
