Boodled by the Art and Artists of ‘The Christophers’

I’ve seen people describe The Christophers as a showcase of “two Titans of British acting,” but I wonder if people saw the same movie I did. Sir Ian McKellen is certainly a Titan, and he gives a magnificent late-career performance as Julian Sklar, a Bad Boy British painter in his late 80s. While Sklar’s work in no way resembles that of, say, Damien Hirst or Francis Bacon, the cultural trappings of his career are vaguely reminiscent. He bypasses the art establishment by selling his paintings at a sidewalk sale in front of his house, for millions of pounds, and has a late-career resurgence as a snarky panelist on a bad reality competition show called Art Fight.

The Christophers★★★ (3/5 stars)
Directed by: Steven Soderbergh
Written by: Ed Solomon
Starring: Sir Ian McKellen, Michaela Coel, James Corden, Jessica Gunning
Running time: 100 mins

Though a cloud of death and illness hangs over the aged Sklar, he remains clear-eyed and cynical about his circumstances. There are no soft edges. He’s snarky, cruel, unsentimental, and totally in control of his finances, grinding out Cameos for $150 a pop to pay his bills, since the art stopped coming long ago. McKellen inhabits this character, pulls on his skin, and is thoroughly believable: both sympathetic and vaguely pathetic.

The other “Titan” is the up and coming Michaela Coel, who created and starred in a well-regarded HBO series, I May Destroy You, but whose other acting credits beyond her own shows are basically limited to bit parts in Wakanda and Star Wars movies as well as a Black Mirror episode. That’s clearly changing, as she plays opposite McKellen in The Christophers and has a leading role in a new Anne Hathaway pop melodrama called Mother Mary, as well as another HBO show coming. It’s her era, and no one can get in the way.

Press play to hear a narrated version of this story, presented by AudioHopper.

Coel plays a painter and an art restorer named Lori who McKellen’s terrible estranged children hire to forge their dad’s paintings. While McKellen acts it to the hilt, a paint-splattered Falstaff in a series of dressing gowns and bad sweaters, Coel mostly just sits or stands around, listening to McKellen rant, occasionally raising an eyebrow. As Dorothy Parker once wrote, her emotions run the gamut from A to B.

The Christophers, which is approximately the 75th movie that Steven Soderbergh has directed since he announced his “retirement” many years ago, is essentially a two-character play, so it requires some sort of interaction between the mains. Soderbergh mostly just stays out of the way and lets his actors work. McKellen takes big swing after big swing, and connects every time. But Coel is a blank canvas. She doesn’t register as an appropriate foil.

Not helping matters are the ludicrous cartoons of Sklar’s children, the other two characters with more than three lines in this film. As portrayed by Jessica Gunning (from Baby Reindeer) and the always unwatchable James Corden, they’re utter morons, but also the only reason this film has a story at all. Anyone who puts James Corden in anything should go to movie jail. Corden can go sing Carpool Karaoke in hell.

As for the “plot” of The Christophers, Sklar has stashed some unfinished paintings of a former male lover in a bathtub in his attic. His children, unbeknownst to Sklar, have pre-sold these paintings to a nameless “tech bro,” but have already spent the advance even though the advance is a million pounds. So they hire Coel to boodle McKellen, but McKellen is a wily fox and cannot be boodled, and Coel, in her heart of hearts, is a true artist and is actually on his side.

The Christophers has some profound points to make about the creative process, and aging, and identity, and authorship, and it makes them over and over again, usually through engaging McKellen monologues while Coel sits there and watches him, looking like a robot from Westworld. Then she wanders around London clutching extremely expensive leather handbags, even though she’s a broke artist who lives in a communal space and works in a Chinese food truck along the Thames. She delivers a surprisingly artless performance in a movie about art, never dropping a tear, barely cracking a smile, remaining utterly inscrutable. Considering that her fellow Titan is essentially a needy, gaping wound of a man, suffering and vulnerable, a little give-and-take would have been much more satisfying.