Sometimes, it seems that director Steven Soderbergh can do just about anything. His 1989 sex, lies and videotape became the first real hit out of the Sundance Film Festival, and some say the picture assured the future of that event.
He’s made thrillers like Out of Sight. Oceans 11, a remake of the 1960 rat pack hit shows that Soderbergh does Hollywood glitz better than most. In Erin Brockovich, a working-class woman wages a fight against a major polluter. In 2007, Soderbergh even gave a hefty contribution to Milestone Films to complete the restoration of Charles Burnett’s brilliant Killer of Sheep.
And now he’s made The Christophers, about artists and art forgery, creativity and sheer greed, which pairs the 87-year-old master actor Ian McKellan with Michaela Coel, a 39-year-old actress just coming into stardom.
McKellan plays Julian Sklar, a once-famous painter who stopped showing his work years ago, although he has a series of unfinished canvasses sitting in his studio, which his two adult children want to exploit.
That’s an understatement. Barnaby and Sally approach Lori Butler (Michaela Coel), an art restorer and painter, to see if she can fool their father, get to those unfinished paintings, finish them in his style – and they can all make a bundle of money.
But Julian Sklar is no fool and he knows his kids are crooks. He confronts Lori.
This is just the start of the ins and outs of The Christophers. Julian Sklar considers shredding the paintings, or maybe burning them. Sklar and Lori Butler shift between being enemies, then friends and collaborators against Sklar’s children – and then enemies again. Sklar talks endlessly; Lori’s quiet.
It turns out that she may – or may not – harbor an old grudge against him for reckless, nasty comments he made about her painting when she was just starting out.
But what’s also going on in The Christophers is a long, convoluted yet crucial conversation about art and originality and an artist’s ownership of her or his work. And also, what an artist’s work means to the artist as well as to the public. Why Julian Sklar did not finish the Christopher series is a private matter for him. Whatever the public – or his children – may want from the paintings, they hold personal meaning and importance.
Sklar is a garrulous old man. His monologues feel like barriers between himself and Lori, as well as protection against the rest of the world, and even against his own thoughts about the approach of death.
Sklar makes himself into a fortress; he’s so clever a talker – and Ian McKellan so adept an actor – that his words are like stone walls to keep people away from him. In fact, the first shots of Lori before she meets Sklar, show her sketching a massive old stone castle.
But Sklar gets what his kids are up to. They may be devious, but Sklar sees through their schemes, and stays ahead of them.
Director Steven Soderbergh is now 63, a lot younger than Julian Sklar. But The Christophers shows a kind of awareness and settled contemplation that can come from a filmmaker who has a ton of experience and feels assured about his place in the world.
The Christophers tells a complicated, twisty story, but it never feels gimmicky. The movie has that feeling you get when you know the filmmaker you’re giving over to is in control and you’re in good hands.
