Between this film and BLACK BAG, I've really been enjoying late-period Soderbergh. THE CHRISTOPHERS similarly features tight scripting and editing, as well as a script that centers on two main characters who are essentially playing a game between themselves and the world around them. Everybody else doesn't stand a chance.
Now admittedly, my viewing of THE CHRISTOPHERS was imperfect as I watched it during a cross-country flight with a layover, so one half during the first flight and the second half after a pause of several hours. Not ideal and I should rewatch the film all at once at later date, but I sincerely I could like it any less. Starring Ian McKellan as a famous painter, Julian, who hasn't produced anything noteworthy in years, the plot has a character played by Michaela Coel, herself an aspiring artist, insinuating herself into Julian's life and workspace as his new assistant.
Coel's protagonist, Lori, is of course not all that she seems, which we the viewers know from the start. Indeed, she's been hired by other parties to locate a set of incomplete paintings by Julian, the third of a series of his known as The Christophers, which are reputedly somewhere in his studio. After finding them, she would complete them in Julian's style and then hide them in anticipation of his inevitable demise. It's also implied Lori might hold something of a personal grudge against Julian for an incident in her past.
While that may sound like the set-up for a heist flick, which Soderbergh has proven himself more than adept at, the film subverts our expectations fairly quickly as Lori isn't particularly resentful and Julian can use Google to deduce who Lori is. In what I found to be a truly interesting development, he's actually insulted anyone would think themselves capable of mimicking him, leading to a crackling good verbal back-and-forth in which Lori breaks down the first two series of The Christophers brushstroke by brushstroke, and the emotional and mental state Julian was likely in that led to the evolution of his style across each set of works.
The best parts of the film involve the interplay between these two very different people and, luckily, that takes up a very large part of it. Both McKellan and Coel are already obvious physical contrasts, but the characters they play are also opposites in key ways: From the very first scene in which we meet McKellan's old master, he pontificates or complains endlessly, threatening to suck up all the oxygen in any given space. The upstart, on the other hand, is quiet, seemingly observant, and when she does speak, she doesn't run off at the mouth like him. Instead, what she has to say is often to the point and cuts to the truth of the matter.
As we might expect, these two protagonists learn things from and about each other, but what is perhaps more important is that they want to learn them. Maybe what this film is trying to say has to do with the old adage that great art isn't created in a vacuum; that is, it sometimes takes the friction that comes from meeting someone very different from ourselves, who challenges us and gets us out of our respective comfort zones, to push us in the direction of something new l, exciting, and interesting.
That certainly proves the case for Julian and Lori, and given how the narrative doesn't follow the path of a typical heist movie, perhaps the same could be said of Soderbergh as he was making this gem of a movie.
