Steven Soderbergh's London period began with 2023's sketchy, feetfinding Magic Mike's Last Dance, but it clicked up another level entirely with last year's terrific Black Bag, a spy drama that ultimately proved less about spying per se than it was about the nature of all relationships. Soderbergh continues to move quickly while covering his own tracks: his new film, The Christophers, is a curious, minor-key heist movie trailing ideas about the processes of creation and the true value of art. Representing the downtrodden and penniless among us is Michaela Coel's Lori, the Magic Mike of Central St. Martins: a former art student turned occasional art restorer reduced to manning a Thames-side noodle truck to supplement her income. In a nearby pub, she's solicited by old college pal Sallie and Barnaby (Jessica Gunning and James Corden), the ingrate children of a celebrated painter, who want Lori to retrieve a box of unfinished works, the Christophers of the title, which their father has squirreled away among the many other items of bric-a-brac in the attic of his Bloomsbury townhouse. The painter is one Julian Sklar (Ian McKellen), an eccentric old cove prone to rants, diatribes and monologues, who looks to have barricaded himself away to shut out the perceived wokery of the modern world. Lori nevertheless inveigles herself into Sklar's life by posing as a prospective personal assistant, only to find her employer is well aware of his own legacy and that he has tricks up his dressing-gown sleeves: one of the first tasks he sets his new PA is to have the Christophers shredded.
If Black Bag found Soderbergh operating somewhere close to the multiplex's cutting edge, the new film is cosier, even cramped; it takes a confoundingly long time for events and their repercussions to unfold. For much of that duration, we're confined among the fusty furnishings of Sklar's narrow bohemian outpost, watching two bristling characters rub up against or otherwise jostle one another. Where Black Bag was propulsive, The Christophers is characterised by a certain pokiness; instead of a Ferrari-tuned plot engine, it has a tub of Peak Freans biscuits. It's as if the challenge Soderbergh set himself was to make two very different kinds of British films: one that could be pitched squarely at the Friday or Saturday night audience, the other at the matinee crowd. (What The Christophers initially suggests, indeed, is a knockoff of Roger Michell's Venus, which offered Peter O'Toole in the McKellen role.) If the new film fits that matinee bill to a tee, it's apparently inspired Soderbergh to abandon any pretence of directorial style - any push for added value - and instead let his actors and Ed Solomon's perilously talky script do the heavy lifting. The pleasures here derive from watching two actors from different places - different worlds, even - meeting head-on somewhere in the middle, yet these characters are almost always more interesting and vivid than the film they're in; they're like figures drawing the eye in what's meant to be a landscape painting. (As if to back up this assertion, Soderbergh makes his backdrop damply nondescript: it screams London in October.)
Coel draws out Lori's wily codeswitching, how the PA's voice and bearing inside Sklar's home varies from her demeanour out in the wider world, but she's never quite as compelling here as she was in David Lowery's recent Mother Mary, a film that embraced and thereby came to take on some of this performer's neo-Cubist angles and edges. Mostly, The Christophers seems much more McKellenish: mildly mischievous, yes, but also windy in its sub-Mametish wrestling with artistic legacy, and more than a little weary from having to labour up and down all these stairs. (For a long while, the supporting cast is limited to a spiralling series of banisters; everyone could have done with a Stannah stairlift.) Both performers are good value, but there's no particular frame around them to speak of: this is one of those projects, much like that Magic Mike threequel, where the speed and economy for which Soderbergh is often feted seems to have precluded any kind of look. (The Christophers does, however, explain the flak this director is currently copping for his use of generative AI in his forthcoming John Lennon doc: that's right, Soderbergh has made another film before you've even had chance to see this one.) It's not entirely artless or worthless - I found myself weirdly gripped by the closing stretch, wanting to know what happens to these people and how the picture(s) would be finished - but for what's notionally a piece about creative individuals, the film is peculiarly indistinct. Perhaps the oddest thing about The Christophers is that anybody could have signed their name to it.
The Christophers is now playing in cinemas nationwide.
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