This Crime Movie Will Steal Your Heart

We hear Ian McKellen in The Christophers before we see him. Now 86 years old (soon 87), McKellen still wields that unmistakable voice, which has lost none of its power or range. It can boom, and it can rumble; with every shift in infection, rhythm, and cadence it can take you on an entire emotional journey. That’s fortunate because we hear a lot of McKellen’s voice in The Christophers. After that verbal introduction, he barely pauses for breath over the next few minutes, as his character —aging artist Julian Sklar — filibusters a job interview with a potential new assistant, mostly by monologuing about a lifetime of perceived insults and mistreatment.

Julian Sklar is something like the Simon Cowell of the art world; a legendary painter who’s famous today mostly as the cruel judge on a reality television show called Art Fight. Once upon a time, Sklar was a true visionary, and, at least as he likes to tell it (and boy, does he like to tell it) a trailblazer, thanks to his glorious brushstrokes and a private life filled with tabloid dramas, public bisexuality, and throuples (or, Sklar quips, what he used to simply call “infidelity”).

At some point before The Christophers begins, Sklar got “canceled” for an unspecified indiscretion, although given the way he treats his employees in this film, it’s easy to envision this man committing any number of professional faux pas. These days he supports himself mostly by recording insincere Cameos on his computer, adopting a phony smile and signing his name in the air in each one because he gets paid extra if he does that. His attitudes are often hopelessly outdated, his treatment of fans is exploitative, and his behavior toward his own children is flat-out cruel. In other words, the man is a scoundrel, but an oddly lovable one.

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In fairness, his kids (Jessica Gunning and James Corden) may deserve Sklar’s scorn. They initiate The Christophers’ narrative when they recruit an old art school friend, Lori (Michaela Coel) to help them pull off an elaborate scheme. In their father’s heyday, he was best-known for a series of portraits called “The Christophers.” He completed two sets of Christophers and began a third that he eventually abandoned to a dingy corner of his attic. (Why he stopped the series prematurely is one of the film’s small but crucial mysteries.)

With Sklar in his final years, his kids — who Sklar has mostly scorned and abandoned — sense an opportunity to ensure an inheritance: What if they paid someone to secretly finish the incomplete Christophers, and leave them buried somewhere in his London townhouse. If they were a convincing enough imitation of their dad’s style, when he died they would be presumed to be authentic Sklars that could then be sold at auction for millions of pounds.

Sklar’s children allude to a reason Lori may want “revenge” on their father, but even without a personal grudge Lori has reason enough to join the siblings. She serves as her receptionist for her art restoration business — which, based on the evidence onscreen, barely exists. When she hangs up calls from potential clients she goes back to working in a food truck. Pointedly, she also takes the bus everywhere she goes. She clearly could use the extra cash.

As this legitimately clever story begins to unfold it initially seems like director Steven Soderbergh made a talkier, smaller-scale spiritual sequel to his Ocean’s 11 heist films. And if The Christophers was just a straight-forward thriller, and it would have been a nifty little entertainment. But screenwriter Ed Solomon repeatedly surprises us with one plot twist after another. He and Soderbergh really invest in Sklar and Lori’s twinned biographies of artistic passion and pain, until the film becomes far richer than a simple crime story.

Even as it narrows in on its two lead characters, it expands to consider the role of creative expression in our lives, and to weave in themes about internet culture, reality television, and particularly how an artist’s life becomes fodder for their work in ways that are sometimes obvious and sometimes invisible to everyone, including the person who made it.

Not that Julian Sklar won’t tell you what he thinks of his work, or his life, or anyone else’s. One of the greatest joys of The Christophers is the space it gives to McKellen to use that incredible voice, and at great length. It’s very easy to believe this man was a brilliant artist, and a hit reality TV star, and an absolute bastard. Like a lot us, and like this movie, he is a lot more complicated than he first appears.

RATING: 8/10