Steven Soderbergh’s been on a roll this year. Two films released, so far, “Presence” and “Black Bag,” both acclaimed, and now he’s screened a third, independently funded effort, at TIFF, but with mixed results.
Soderbergh’s “The Christophers” comes packaged like a sly little chamber piece—set mostly inside a house— an art-forgery caper that insists on being a meditation about authenticity, mortality, and artistic compromise. It flirts with being witty and urbane, and at moments it is.
The dialogue-heavy screenplay, courtesy of Ed Solomon, is expertly rendered by Ian McKellen, the star of the show, and he pours it out with the relish of an actor who knows he’s the whole show. McKellen is the magician here: mischievous, commanding, able to pull off laughs out of every line he utters.
Opposite him is Michaela Coel, miscast in the role of a failed artist turned restorer turned counterfeit accomplice, a woman who holds more inside than she ever releases. She plays Lori, a former artist now juggling art restoration and food-truck shifts, recruited by the estranged heirs of famed painter Julian Sklar (McKellen) to finish his abandoned works and share in the profits after his looming death. Disguised as Sklar’s assistant, she enters his home, only to find her scheme unraveling amid betrayals, shifting loyalties, and unexpected twists.
Together, Coel and McKellen generate an odd-couple back and forth, their scenes filled with verbal sparring that recalls screwball comedies—but slowed down, dampened, almost muffled by the film’s insistence on being stagey.
That’s the trouble: the whole thing has the air of theater. The pacing, at first hampered with talk, only gradually stirs to life, and even then Soderbergh’s direction keeps smoothing over the edges. The script promises titillation and deception—art heists, forged canvases, family betrayals—but what we get is a polite talky game. It’s not a bold swing.
The film is intimate, satisfying in patches, and McKellen’s presence makes it difficult to dismiss, but there’s something dispiriting about watching a movie that teases danger and instead offers nothing but witty banter, as though afraid to disturb the calm.
“The Christophers” is only mildly enjoyable, yes, and McKellen’s dazzle keeps it from sinking, but it’s also Soderbergh holding back, a trivial canvas stretched too tight.