While making this week’s film, “The Christophers,” risk-taker Steven Soderbergh wisely exhibits self-restraint and lets his actors serve a master class in executing writer Ed Solomon’s searingly funny script.
Filmed in London in just nineteen days, “The Christophers” stars Ian McKellen as the fictional artist Julian Sklar, who is nearing the end of his life. The painter is famously successful, once holding court in an early version of television’s “Who’s Got Talent” for young artists. However, after decades of professional decline, Julian is now forced to survive by selling tacky birthday video-grams. Julian’s estranged adult children, played by the always hilarious James Corden and Jessica Gunning, hire another artist, played by Michaela Coel, to finish the painter’s once highly anticipated, but never completed series named “The Christophers.” The sibling’s plan is to “discover” the forged completed series after their father’s death, so they can sell the paintings as their inheritance.
Soderbergh loves mixing a good criminal caper with the impacts of capitalism on the human condition, and he could easily have gone over the top by delivering a slick art conspiracy. While he employs just enough strain theory and twists to keep the narrative moving, Soderberg adeptly turns the reins over to McKellen and Coel, who Solomon wrote the script for from the outset. While we’ve certainly seen the old artist reignited by the young artist narrative a hundred times, McKellen and Coel simply redefine the dynamic by delivering performances that are at their strongest in simple, silent glances as well as when clicking off a scathing, well-timed retort.
So, on my ski trail rating system, “The Christophers” earns my highest BLACK DIAMOND ski trail rating. Just as director Tim Burton wisely took a back seat to Amy Adams and Christoph Waltz in the art biopic “Big Eyes” (2014), Steven Soderbergh lets Ian McKellen and Michaela Coel serve up a surprisingly emotional character study, while still getting in his comedic punches on the over-commoditization of art.
“The Christophers” has a run-time of one hundred minutes and is playing in theaters in a limited release. The film is rated R for language and abrupt honesty.
