In Steven Soderbergh’s ‘The Christophers,’ an Aging Artist Meets His Match

Though director Steven Soderbergh’s legacy is probably secure at this point, he keeps burnishing it every year or so with a twisty, tricky dramedy. His latest — The Christophers — turns out to be a deep dive into artistic legacy itself.

It centers on artist Julian Sklar, a once famous and in-demand painter who now supports himself by recording personalized messages on a Cameo-style platform. Sklar is variously said to be fading, ailing and near death, but played by an 86-year-old Ian McKellen, he spends the whole film running up and down stairs in his grandly decrepit London townhouse.

Sklar’s indefatigable, but his cachet has waned. Where his early paintings now sell for millions, he can barely give his more recent work away. Which is why his rapacious kids — grubby opportunists as played by James Corden and Jessica Gunning — have gotten in touch with art restorer Lori Butler (I May Destroy You‘s Michaela Coel) with a proposal. They want her to “complete” eight of their father’s never-seen portrait sketches, so they can pass them off as recently discovered early works from his most celebrated period.

The sketches were for a third set in a series known as The Christophers — portraits of a young man Sklar had fallen in love with. Works from the first and second set have been selling for upwards of $3 million. The idea is that she’ll get a job as his assistant, locate the unfinished canvases in his storeroom, finish them in his style using paint and brushes from that period, and replace them to be found after his death.

The kids have even set up an interview for Lori with their father. And though she can barely get a word in as he bloviates about art and his contempt for the commercialism of an art world that’s turned on him, she gets the gig. At which point hidden agendas come into play, along with blackmail, betrayal, double-crosses, and from a master who feels threatened, a masterstroke: Sklar decides to burn The Christophers. Why does he feel so strongly? Turns out, that’s a story Lori may understand better than Sklar does himself.

McKellen makes Sklar a blustering wonder, which contrasts neatly with Coel’s mostly reserved Lori. As pictured by Soderbergh and writer Ed Solomon, the two are oil-and-watercolor, as it were, each playing by different rules.

Eschewing the flashy filmmaking of his thriller Black Bag last year, Soderbergh treats this story as a virtual two-hander that could almost have been produced on stage, placing his trust in his performers. McKellen blusters and cajoles, running up and down those staircases, while Coel fumes but keeps her powder dry for a steely take-down when Sklar needs putting in his place. All in the service of a film that could have settled for being a masterclass in technique, but instead goes deeper, exploring questions of artistry, authorship, legacy.

“I’ve no problem with questions, Lori,” McKellen’s Sklar mutters magisterially, “it’s the answers I can’t be bothered with.”

Happily, Soderbergh and company can be bothered, and the answers The Christophers provides are as artful as anyone might wish.

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