Julian Sklar (Ian McKellan) has, he says, painted nothing but shit in 30 years and nothing at all for 20. In the Sixties he was a major star of the British art scene. Now he’s reduced to making personalised video messages for fans (apparently he still has plenty), wearing a blue beret for an authentically artistic look. £149 a pop, £249 “if I sign”.
This is prolific director Steven Soderbergh’s fourth collaboration with screenwriter Ed Solomon (Mosaic, No Sudden Move, Full Circle) and they created it with McKellan and Michaela Coel (I May Destroy You), who plays an art forger, specifically in mind (the film was shot in London in 19 days; there are several scenes on buses). Soderbergh’s oeuvre is extraordinarily varied – Black Bag last year, the Oceans trilogy, Traffic, Erin Brockovich, Contagion – the list goes on. The Christophers is almost a two-hander, and another new departure.
McKellan is marvellous as the acerbic, disappointed Sklar and Coel, as Lori Butler, is a fine foil, remaining watchful and careful (“Yeah, I mean,” is one of her favourite phrases) while her eyes are extraordinarily expressive. The dialogue is often very funny. “I’m sure we had that conversation yesterday,” says Julian, who never stops talking at her. “There was speaking, if that’s what you mean,” mutters Lori.
She is employed by Julian’s vengeful children, Sallie (Jessica Gunning; Baby Reindeer; The Outlaws) and Barnaby (James Corden) who want to get the inheritance they think they deserve by getting her to pose as Julian’s assistant and forge an unfinished series of eight paintings called the Christophers, named after his former lover (the phenomenally untalented artist Sallie tracks Lori down, having known her at art school, remembering her imitative skills).
His kids hate him because he was absent and never loved them. He’s not keen on them either, calling them wrecks. Sallie’s the harridan, Barnaby’s the dud. Blame their mothers, he says - their failings are nothing to do with him. They’re caricature-like, played for laughs, and their performances are slightly jarring in contrast to McKellan and Coel’s virtuosity. But underneath the vitriol and bluster, Julian’s as broken as his children.
There are many twists and turns in the forgery process, some quite hard to fathom. But what’s clear is that these paintings will be priceless. The first two series of Christophers have been sold for many millions. If all goes to plan, she’ll finish the third lot and return them to the attic where Julian has stashed them. After his death – not far off, one imagines – they’ll be discovered, and Bob’s your uncle. And Lori will get a third of the proceeds.
After initial misgivings, Lori’s keen to take the job because she too wants revenge on Julian. When she was 19 he was brutal in his assessment of her landscape painting in a TV show called Art Fight where he was a bitchy judge. “It’s a cry for help from the paint itself,” he snarled, causing her to quit showing and become a restorer, with a side hustle in forgery. Of course, Julian doesn’t remember her. Until much later.
Julian’s house has two front doors, side by side, and in Alice through the Looking-Glass style, it’s always the wrong doorbell that Lori rings. “Other door,” intones Julian through the intercom, which could almost be a metaphor for their relationship. One house is his workspace, the other his living quarters (the camera changes to hand-held mode when the threshold is crossed). He appears on the stairs, of which there are many flights, with his bare chest revealed above his half-open bathrobe. He hopes Lori doesn’t mind. Yes, she does. “Weinstein has ruined the robe for the rest of us,” says Julian sadly.
She also minds that he asks her if she has a partner, though later she reveals, when he asks if she’s ever been betrayed, that she did have one “who left me for my other partner.” “Was this a throuple?” asks Julian, who is bisexual, gleefully. “I was in a throuple,” he says, “back when it was merely called infidelity.”
Julian may be from another era but he’s perfectly capable of finding Lori on the internet (you do wonder why she gives him her real name). Never underestimate a man who’s spent decades googling himself, he tells her sharply, having realised that there’s more to his new assistant than meets the eye. She’s written scathing essays about his work online, citing his bloated ego and calling his work a junk-heap of irrelevance that should go the way of the lava lamp and the leisure suit.
Nevertheless, a complex agreement is reached, partly because he’s impressed by Lori’s remarkable analysis of the shifts in his technique (Soderbergh and Solomon consulted Sixties pop artist Jann Haworth on this) before the bitter break-up with Christopher that led him to stop painting. He even visits her studio unannounced and decides he was wrong about that landscape painting of hers – it has power that he missed. Another painting, however, by a hopeful colleague who is looking on in awe, is “absolute shit.”
Watching Julian take a knife to one of the Christopher canvases after hurling paint, glitter and feathers at it is viscerally painful to watch. The underlying questions about all artists’ fears of irrelevance, about authenticity, legacy and mortality are fascinating. And in the end, even those personalised messages are given artistic life.
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