The Christophers

 The Christophers is a civilized, witty, minor entertainment.  Directed by Stephen Soderbergh, who apparently can work well in all genres, the movie is diverting with an intriguing premise:  an elderly artist, Julian Sklar (Ian McKellen) suffers from an artistic block and has given up on making new pictures.  Sklar painted several series of portraits celebrating his love affair with "Christopher" in the early 1990's.  The last set of pictures, eight all told, were begun but abandoned.  Sklar has kept the unfinished pictures but locked them away on the third floor of his house in London -- he claims that he wants nothing to do with these failures.  Sklar has a daughter and son with whom he is estranged and that he apparently despises -- he calls them "Buzzard Barnaby" and "Hyena Sallie".  Barnaby and Sallie hire a brilliant art critic and restorer, although she isn't known to the general public, to work as their father's assistant, locate the unfinished "Christophers" and mimic the old master, creating forgeries that they can sell.  (The last sale of a "Christopher", years earlier, grossed 2.5 million Euros.)  The critic and restorer, Lori Butler accepts the assignment and applies for work as the old painter's assistant.  She clashes immediately with the elderly painter who is autocratic, selfish, and loquacious -- she can scarcely get a word in edgewise.  Lori finds the Christophers but is told to destroy them.  Instead, she paints close imitations and, then, tears them up with a box-cutter.  The old painter discovers the deception and says he wants her to help burn the unfinished canvases.  But, when she asks him why he has kept the pictures in their incomplete form for 25 years, he can't bring himself to destroy them.  The film is mostly a sort of mystery, with riddles to solve, but, also, a very mild satire of the art business.  Julian Sklar seems to be modeled off Lucien Freud with elements of Francis Bacon.  

The film seems a record of a very tightly organized and parsimonious theater production.  The dialogue has the elevated quality of topnotch British theater and the play is essentially a two-hander, a kind of odd couple comedy with strains of drama involving the old artist, played as a nasty, sarcastic curmudgeon and the restorer, Lori Butler.  Lori is acted by Michaela Coel, a striking actress of Ghanian heritage -- she has a classical profile and enormous eyes and, according to your preferences, is either a very beautiful woman or some sort of space alien.  (I tend toward space alien -- but this is prejudice: in any event, she is very ethereal-looking and seems somehow other-worldly.)  The duel between these two characters is at the heart of the movie and, when the two of them are together, the dialogue crackles and pops. There is a backstory involving Lori -- she was inspired to become an artist by seeing a picture made by Sklar when he was a six-year old child; later, she appeared on a TV program called "Art Fight" in which Sklar as a panelist (like Simon Callow) excoriated one of her canvases when she was 19.  Lori is no shrinking violet and can give as good as she gets.  She repaid Sklar for this televised contempt by writing an essay about him for an art journal in which she calls him a "bloviating failure" among other, even, worse insults. The plot is too complex to detail, involving different variations on the destruction, reconstruction, and revival of the paintings.  In the end, they are completed albeit not as anyone expects.  Sklar has a retrospective entitled Julian Sklar reviled or revived -- the handwriting from which the title derives is unclear.  The movie has a happy ending and the characters are rewarded according to their just deserts. Soderbergh, nothing if not reliably flexible, can direct this sort of material in his sleep -- and, in fact, there's something mildly somnolent about the movie.  It feels like a version of Hacks with McKellen playing the part of Jean Smart and the young acolyte (Hannah Einbinder) in the TV show played by Michaela Cole.  The film is intelligent, very effectively written, and diverting.  It's not exciting but who needs a constant diet of excitement?  In my estimation, the movie seems like a typically well-crafted British mystery show with good production values and excellent acting.  James Corden playing Barnaby Sklar and Jessica Gunning (late of Baby Reindeer) act the parts of the scheming artist's children