The Christophers

When Steven Soderbergh returned from a brief (and busy) retirement, no time was wasted in reasserting his standing as perhaps our most industrious mainstream filmmaker, his paradoxical blend of hyper-efficiency and innovation resulting in two iPhone-shot features and, more recently, the spy romp Black Bag, which felt like his most energising work in some time. Soderbergh’s goal is delivering his material speedily and with the minimum of fuss, happily using whichever new technologies may enable that result. He applies his typical tight economy to this new, mellower heist drama, for better and worse.

Lori Butler (Michaela Coel) – a painter whose public aspirations have long gone dormant – is approached by the estranged wayward children of a once-esteemed artist (James Corden and Jessica Gunning) with a rare opportunity. In hopes of obtaining an inheritance from their bitter old man, the siblings plan to have Lori pose as his assistant, effectively steal three never-completed paintings (the titular Christophers) from his London townhouse, and complete them in a replication of his style so exact that no one will be able to tell the difference. In need of money, Lori agrees, and finds herself promptly faced with Julian Sklar (Ian McKellen), a miserable recluse who’s been craving someone to impress. Coel and McKellen are performers keenly attuned to the present moment, watchful and watchable enough to make clear when their characters are thinking up a storm while withholding the exact nature of their thoughts. Lori may be motivated by greater personal animus than she’s told her employers, and Sklar may well know it, but the two are, for a time, content just to size each other up. There’s real, unexpected chemistry in this duo.

Still, even with performers this magnetic, there’s a stifling airlessness to the drama of The Christophers, a feeling that Soderbergh’s coolly observant camera entraps material that may have been liberated by the stage. Few have made the work of gentlemen thieves look quite so effortlessly cool, but the director’s customary, all-business slickness can also slide his movies frictionlessly off one’s back. There’s little real sense of play in The Christophers, and little sense of the love either Sklar or Lori has (or once had) invested in the work. If Sklar ever had much joy in painting, it’s long been stamped out by the obligations of the hacky art competition show he once hosted, playing Lord Sugar to a legion of crushed hopefuls. It’s hard to be moved by the re-ignition of his life force, just as it’s hard to be moved by screenwriter Ed Solomon’s final conclusions on what, if any, legacy the old man leaves.

The Christophers is heavily concerned with questions of artistic authorship and reproduction. Can an artist’s signature style be faithfully reproduced? Is an artist’s output a signifier of their singularity, or does it matter how a work of art is produced (and by whom) at all? It’s subject matter that’s dispiritingly, almost perversely timely in the present moment in light of Soderbergh’s own recent admission to the use of “a lot of AI” on forthcoming projects, among them a documentary for which “thematically surreal images” will be generated (the paintings featured in this film were rendered by the British artist Barnaby Gorton). Newly framed within this context, the movie is suffused with the bleak bitterness of artistic defeat, conceding to the tide before it sweeps its maker away.

Ultimately, the latest feature from Steven Soderbergh provides a welcome showcase for two performers across generational divides, revelling in a script that grants them the pleasures of good lines and piquant timing with which to say them. On its own, there’s much here to gladden the heart on the current state of the movies as art and commerce. Nonetheless, there’s an undercurrent of despair for their future, intentional or otherwise. This slight, cool-to-the-touch drama can’t stop whatever’s coming, and may not want to.