The Christophers (Preview)
Reviewed by Mary F. Corey

Produced by Iain A. Canning and Jim Parks; directed by Steven Soderbergh; screenplay by Ed Solomon; edited by Steven Soderbergh (as Mary Ann Bernard); cinematography by Steven Soderbergh (as Peter Andrews); production design by Antonia Lowe; costume design by Eleanor Baker; music by David Holmes; starring Ian McKellen, Michaela Coel, Jessica Gunning, and James Corden. Color, 100 min. A NEON release.

When utility player Enrique “Kike” Hernández was traded to the Los Angeles Dodgers in 2015, he was asked what position he liked to play best. Without a beat, he famously answered, “I want to play baseball.” Steven Soderbergh retired from baseball when he was twelve. And when he was fifty, he retired from filmmaking, saying “movies don’t matter.” Luckily for filmgoers, when he was fifty-five, he decided they did matter and, ever since, this prolific cinematic utility man has been furiously making movies. All kinds of movies.

His love for the craft of filmmaking, his catholic curiosity, and his madly witty screwball-comedy chops have enriched American cinema for thirty years. A jack of all genres, Soderbergh is an auteur without snobbery or pretentiousness. (Howard Hawks comes to mind.) He seems to ignore distinctions between high and low, studio blockbusters, trippy indies, or TV series. He has focused his camera on male strippers, casino thieves, Liberace, NASCAR, the NBA, Che Guevara, bank robbers, a sexy federal marshal, a cocaine-sniffing late-nineteenth-century surgeon, and a weird guy who likes to videotape women while they talk about their sex lives.

The set-up of The Christophers is a schematic but elevated version of the timeworn trope in which Person A meets Person B, and each is transformed in some way. Michaela Coel, the creator and star of the TV series I May Destroy You, plays Lori Butler, a struggling artist with a flair for forgery and a chip on her shoulder. She is contacted by the scheming offspring of a once-famous British artist, Julian Sklar (Ian McKellen), who offers living proof that enfant terrible-ism does not age well. Julian’s estranged children—the greedy siblings Sallie (Jessica Gunning), whom Julian refers to as “that hyena,” and Barnaby (James Corden), “the dud”—want Lori to pose as Julian’s new assistant, earn his trust, and then forge and/or finish some of his famously unfinished series of portraits, “The Christophers,” which, if completed, will make them very rich once Julian dies—an event they are rapturously awaiting.

The film is essentially a two-hander, in which Lori and Julian meet as antagonists, snapping and snarling their way into an uneasy almost tender complicity. (Or do they?) They are evenly matched in terms of cunning, and it is often hard to know when or if their various détentes are on the level. A wasted Jessica Gunning and an equally wasted James Corden do show up at the studio once to see how their little plot is coming along. But Julian brutishly dispatches them like a couple of cockroaches. I was very happy to see them go because their characters are so cartoonishly drawn that I expected at any moment one of them to take a pie in the face.

Is The Christophers a great Soderbergh film? Probably not. But it is a very good Soderbergh film—one among many. Some critics have complained that Soderbergh has yet to make a masterpiece. But I don’t think he sets out to make masterpieces. Instead, he focuses his prodigious curiosity and his camera on an idea, a problem, or a wild experiment—a puzzle he is keen to solve. Can a horror film be told through the eyes of a ghost? Presence (2025). How about letting Meryl Streep, Dianne Wiest, and Candice Bergen loose on a transatlantic ship to improvise from a story outline by the literary luminary Deborah Eisenberg? Let Them All Talk (2020). Or a reimagining of a Tarkovsky sci-fi film? Solaris (2002). His prolific output, some thirty-seven films and six TV series, has the effect of altering the way one assesses any single part of his oeuvre.        The Internet teems with Soderbergh rankings, which of course vary according to who is doing the ranking. Men’s Health and IndieWire do not see eye to eye on the matter. My top five, in no particular order, would be Out of Sight (1998), Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989), Magic Mike (2012), The Knick (2014–15), and Behind the Candelabra (2013). In my Soderbergh pantheon, The Christophers takes its place firmly at the high end of the middle, along with High Flying Bird (2019), and the later Ocean’s films (2001–07).

It is Coel and McKellen who lift The Christophers to the rafters. It is not news that Ian McKellen can command a stage or a screen, and his bravura performance as a debauched, snarling alpha male on his way out is stunning. But Michaela Coel as the fierce, gifted, and unrewarded Lori more than holds her own. Their animus is situational, generational, and, in Lori’s case. personal. Years earlier, on a TV show called Art Fight, in which Julian judged the work of aspiring painters, he savagely derided an early landscape painting by a then-nineteen-year-old Lori, saying, “It’s not a painting, Lori. It is a cry for help from the paint itself. Why am I here, it screams.” The excoriating public criticism led her to cease exhibiting her work and undertake restoration and forgery work…

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Mary F. Corey teaches history at UCLA where she specializes in intellectual history and African American history.

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Cineaste, Vol. LI, No. 4