‘The Christophers’ gives Ian McKellen his best role in decades
Steven Soderbergh makes movies at an alarming rate – sometimes three per year – and even his most ardent fans know to approach each new release with reserved expectations.
At his best, he is a master of twisty, propulsive, supremely economical storytelling, as shown in movies like Sex, Lies, and Videotape, The Limey, Out of Sight, and Black Bag. At his worst, his movies feel like lifeless technical exercises that reek of smugness.
In his latest film, The Christophers, however, neither of these options seems relevant because Ian McKellen gives a performance that is so riveting that it trounces every other factor. He plays Julian Sklar, an ageing artist who was once a darling of the art world but who has since fallen spectacularly from grace. At some point, he went from painting masterpieces to drunkenly lambasting amateur artists on a reality TV show called Art Fight. Now, he sits alone in his London townhouse, recording Cameo messages for £150 a pop.
His comfortable state of capitulation is ruined by his two adult children, played by Baby Reindeer’s Jessica Gunning and James Corden, who, sensing his impending death, want to shore up their inheritance by paying someone to finish his mythical series of paintings known as ‘The Christophers’. They hire Lori, played by Michaela Coel, to pose as his assistant in order to gain access to the paintings. Once a worshipful fan, Lori has soured on Julian just like the rest of the art world, but once they meet, she has misgivings about her assignment.
The Christophers was scripted by Ed Solomon, who has the not-so-esteemed distinction of being the man who gave us the Now You See Me franchise and the McG-directed Charlie’s Angels. Luckily, he seems to have tapped into a different plane of existence here, creating a stage for Julian to monologue and riff for much of the film’s 100-minute running time.
Most actors would struggle to carry such a hefty task, but McKellen was born for it. In fact, at 86, he appears to be in the best acting form of his life. As Julian, he is self-absorbed, thin-skinned, dismissive, shrewd, petulant, and charming. When he first meets Lori to interview her for the job, he unleashes a meandering, wittily acerbic monologue and doesn’t ask her a single question. He is both self-aware and facetious.
Of his detested children, he says, “Blame their mothers. I had nothing to do with them.” Importantly, he is never demoted to a childlike elder, one of the most pernicious forms of ageism in modern society. When Lori tells him that she was once left by one partner for her other partner, he muses, “I was once in a throuple, back when it was just called infidelity.”
These lines are funny on the page, but it’s self-defeating to write them down because their full impact lies in McKellen’s delivery. Sure, it’s a good script, but it could easily be too wordy in the hands of a lesser actor. McKellen is to dialogue what Audrey Hepburn was to fashion. No matter how flowery or ostentatious the material he has to work with, he is the one we notice, not the words he’s speaking.
He mutters some lines and lingers on others. His inflexion is unpredictable but natural. He reels off pages of unbroken monologues and makes it sound like the off-the-cuff musings of a man who spends a lot of time alone, thinking about himself, reframing himself, and avoiding himself.
One of the key themes of The Christophers is whether creativity wanes with age. It’s explored in a refreshingly unsentimental manner to the very last frame, but it is also undermined the moment McKellen opens his mouth. He is so undeniably at the top of his game that we are left to conclude, immediately, that the answer to the question is: absolutely not.
The Oscar-nominated star became a legendary Shakespearean actor all the way back in the 1970s. He was considered a late bloomer when he entered the film world in his 40s, and his celebrity was set in stone when he played Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings trilogy in his late 50s. Fast forward 25 years, and his craft seems to have only gotten stronger. He is electric in The Christophers, which is not a descriptor that often comes to mind for someone pushing 90.
There have been several movies that have explored subversiveness in old age recently, including the mawkishly dull, star-studded adaptation of The Tuesday Murder Club and the sentimental Michael Caine vehicle The Great Escaper, but they almost always come across as inadvertently condescending by giving their stars unproblematic characters. With The Christophers, McKellen is presented with a flawed, self-involved, largely unrepentant figure who talks constantly but rarely reveals himself.
In the moments when Julian lets his guard down, McKellen is magnificently fragile. It is a tour de force performance and among the best of his career.
