Before he heads off for one final round as Gandalf in The Lord Of The Rings: The Hunt For Gollum, Sir Ian McKellen gives himself – and us – a truly wizard treat with The Christophers. This sly, twisty London art-world comedy-drama finds the spry 86-year-old on superb form as Julian Sklar, a bad-boy British artist of the 1960s who hasn't painted for decades.
Instead, Julian spends his solitary days cashing in on his fleeting fame as the nasty, Simon Cowell-style judge of a 1990s TV show called Art Fight: popping on a cheesy beret and recording Cameo-style personalised video messages for his fans. Meanwhile, Julian's bungling, faintly ghastly children – played by James Corden and Baby Reindeer's Jessica Gunning – are eager to get their mitts on some cold, hard inheritance. They recruit an impoverished art restorer named Lori (Michaela Coel), supposedly to be their father's new assistant. In fact, they have hired her to forge 'The Christophers', Julian's legendary series of unfinished paintings, whose originals are hidden somewhere inside his dishevelled Bloomsbury townhouse.
Prolific filmmaker Steven Soderbergh may be best known for Ocean's Eleven, but his 37th feature is no heist caper. The Christophers mainly revolves around two people talking in a room – but what a thrilling twosome they are. Lip-smacking over every morsel of dialogue, McKellen is deliciously wily and waspish as an egocentric old coot who hogs all the best lines. 'Weinstein ruined the robe for the rest of us,' he sighs, peacocking past Lori in a dressing gown with next to nothing underneath. Yet Coel's Lori proves a worthy opponent. While Julian blusters, she brings an inscrutable, coolly watchful quality to bear. It is Coel's Sphinx-like screen presence that makes this battle of wills truly special.
Written by Ed Solomon (Bill & Ted, Men In Black), The Christophers can feel stagey at times, but there are enough playful rug-pulls to keep viewers engaged. It is ideal for a film club to pick apart over a glass of wine because, like a fine painting itself, it reveals many layers.
Steven Soderbergh is a prolific film-maker, but given that his past credits range from sex, lies and videotape to Erin Brockovich, Magic Mike to Ocean's 11, it is safe to say we are never quite sure what we are going to get next. That is certainly true of The Christophers, where the American director not only takes a sceptical, almost jaundiced view of the world of fine art but also comes to London to do it. Julian Sklar was once a giant of the British art scene, we are asked to believe. But while his real-life contemporaries, Freud, Bacon and Auerbach retained their creative renown right up until their deaths, the fictional Sklar's popularity peaked in the 1990s and then slumped. Now, with even a secondary career as acerbic celebrity critic on a TV art show behind him, he keeps himself in pocket money selling recorded messages to his dwindling army of fans. Small wonder that his grasping children – the 'heirs abhorrent' as he calls them – Barnaby and Sallie have their eyes on a famously uncompleted series of paintings that lie in their father's loft.
If finished, The Christophers – portraits of a handsome young man – would be worth millions, but Sklar will not go near them – too painful. But if he will not finish them, maybe someone else, slightly illegally, could? Enter Lori Butler, who was at art school with the spectacularly untalented Sallie. These days, Lori restores more art than she actually paints herself and has a rare talent for mimicking the styles of others. She also seems to have history with Sklar which, when the pair finally meet, the mercurial painter seems to have forgotten about. Or has he? It is game on. What ensues, thanks to Ed Solomon's screenplay, is astonishingly wordy and often seems more like a showcase for McKellen's theatrical talents than a full-on feature film. It is challengingly complicated too, with each of our central characters repeatedly gaining the upper hand only to lose it again. And again. McKellen, never an actor shy of giving it plenty, is fabulously watchable while Coel dials her own performance down to pleasing if somewhat enigmatic effect. But with so little genuinely at stake and despite David Holmes' lovely music, this is an artfully contrived, high-brow drama that often entertains but never quite grips.
