‘The Christophers’ Review: Ian McKellen is an Irritable, Aging Painter in Steven Soderbergh’s Warm and Funny Chamber Drama About Artistic Integrity [B+] TIFF

You can, of course, leave it to Steven Soderbergh of all people to make a biting and salient drama about the ways we value and devalue art. As a man who has embraced the spectrum of major blockbusters and smaller, off-kilter projects — the latter of which have encompassed most of his post-retirement period — he’s a director well suited to exploring the delta between art as commerce and art as passion, and discerning the fragile line where the essence of the two intersect.

The Christophers, Soderbergh’s third film in the span of the year, is the first one not written by David Koepp. He instead re-teams with Ed Solomon, the scribe of Soderbergh’s 2021 crime movie No Sudden Move, as well as Men In Black, and the first two Bill & Ted films, to tell a story with the same ground-level scope that embodies so many of the director’s recent projects. But The Christophers is a traditional drama, which is to say a little more classical than some of Soderbergh’s more playful experiments — almost play-like in its limited location work and the sparring dialogue that cleanly develops the shifting relationship of its two leads.

One of those leads is Michaela Coel as Lori Butler, an art restorer, contacted about a new job by Barnaby (James Cordon) and Sallie Sklar (Jessica Gunning). They want Linda to finish an infamously unfinished series of paintings by their father to obtain a substantial inheritance. Their father’s name is Julian Sklar (Ian McKellen), and he is a once world-renowned painter, now living as a bitter recluse in a cluttered London flat, estranged from his children and sitting on a legacy that he’s done well to spoil. 

His children aren’t much better, though. At every turn, they seek to exploit their father’s legacy for profit. If people believe Linda’s restorations were actually done by Julian back during his prime, they could sell for a hefty price tag. In the future, after he dies, perhaps they could even turn his home into a Julian Sklar museum and charge tourists an exorbitant fee to enter. Solomon’s script makes these two leeches a bit of an easy target — there’s little to ruminate on regarding why these two may be so malcontent with their father, and it’s made clear that Julian was shunned out of the industry for a cancellable transgression. In fact, Linda had previously written a blog about the incident and how it impacts the man’s legacy, something Julian discovers when he smells something fishy with her sudden insistence on being his assistant.

This is what triggers the fluctuating modes of character dynamics, as Julian is resolute in keeping his paintings unfinished, and Linda is steadfast in staying true to her own, sometimes obscure, objectives. Once the swindle is found out early on, Julian is irritated but blasé about the situation: “It’s the smartest thing they’ve thought of in decades,” quips McKellen, who brings to his performance as Julian the gravitational weight of being one of our greatest living screen actors who is now in the back half of his 80s, while having a bit of cunning fun with Solomon’s witty screenplay, which offers plenty of verbal jabs and comical ironies for the characters to exchange out of their dueling intentions. Julian is crotchety but also a bit of a joker, knowingly stepping over small boundaries with Linda to throw her off balance and test her intellectual, artistic, and ethical mettle, and McKellen plays him with a fiendish prankishness.

For her part, Coel is very good as Linda, staying emotionally withdrawn from Julian’s more caustic ribbing and griping to prioritize what’s best for her, which at different points means staying loyal to Julian’s wishes or betraying him to at least get a decent payday out of his mooching kids. Julian’s tottering and traditionalist nature can often slip over into outright affronts, and leaves Linda wondering if the price of staying true to art is too much to bear for a man who seems perfectly happy living and dying alone in relative obscurity. 

Along with a hidden shared history between Linda and Julian, that’s what gets under Linda’s skin the most: the fact that a once-great master seems content not to try, allowing himself to rot within his own bitterness surrounding the fact that public opinion has become the defining characteristic of his career. The two have instances of unification throughout the film, and the biggest one comes out of a shared devaluation of art, when it seems like their own scheme that they eventually concoct will trump that of the one that initiated the plot. Soderbergh and Solomon aren’t content making it that easy, though, and their relationship never stops evolving all the way through the film’s final frames. 

Once again working as his own cinematographer, Soderbergh wields a typically assured sense of control over a film that is often stunning in a restrained capacity. In making what is essentially a comical chamber drama about art and culture, The Christophers is well-contained but feels wide-reaching within the context of the ideologies of its characters. Soderbergh’s handheld camera smoothly tracks them within the confines of the apartment, efficiently supporting Solomon’s words, with a fanciful score from David Holmes helping advance the turns of the dialogue and the blocking of the actors. It may feel like it’s built for the stage, but Soderbergh is not one to discount the cinematic quality you can bring to two people standing in a room and talking to each other.

Despite a more orthodox veneer, The Christophers easily slots in with other recent Soderbergh works in feeling like yet another curious digression in a career that, at this point, has turned into a perpetual series of quaint and unexpected pit stops. It’s more calmly methodical and skilled than emotionally charged, and even its eventual form of emotional and intellectual catharsis comes from a place of muted wisdom. But as a movie about the price of artistic integrity, one’s legacy, and of preserving the power of artistry unblemished from parasitic systems of ownership and control, The Christophers is a soothing reassurance that the power of art has its own inherent value.

Grade: B+

This review is from the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival where The Christophers had its world premiere. There is no U.S. distribution at this time.