Steven Soderbergh’s latest London-set film, The Christophers, has provided an unexpectedly delightful portrait of the contemporary art world, anchored by a striking on-screen partnership between Ian McKellen and Michaela Coel. The seasoned performer plays Julian Sklar, a curmudgeonly and dated painter residing in bohemian poverty in Bloomsbury, whilst Coel portrays Lori Butler, a ex-art student hired as his assistant. Written by American screenwriter Ed Solomons, the film blends keen humour and intellectual sophistication with genuine emotional depth, offering a refreshingly unsentimental take on questions of creative worth and cultural relevance. The result is a energetic, rapid-fire comedy that ranks alongside the best portrayals of English society in contemporary film.
A Director’s Expert Guide to Surprising Viewers
Steven Soderbergh demonstrates a uncommon ability amongst even the most acclaimed filmmakers: an steadfast talent to captivate viewers. This constantly active director maintains creative discipline, crafting eclectic projects with seemingly effortless versatility. His approach—shooting digitally, using confined spaces, and drawing exceptional work from unfailingly impressive casts—has become his signature style. Having recently moved to the United Kingdom, Soderbergh has crafted a London-based picture that proves electrifying and witty in equal parts, as bracing as a generous vodka and tonic consumed before lunch. The film progresses with striking velocity and sophistication, its plot developments treated obliquely and without a hint of emotional excess.
In creating Julian Sklar, Soderbergh and screenwriter Ed Solomons have achieved something remarkable: a compelling depiction of reactionary Englishness that stands alongside the finest examples in contemporary cinema. Previously, one might have pointed to Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread or Robert Altman’s Gosford Park as the benchmark for Americans capturing genuine English superiority. Yet Soderbergh and Solomons—the latter the relative of John Cleese—have demonstrated themselves to be just as skilled at conveying the particular flavour of English eccentricity, cantankerousness and cultural pretension that characterises their main character’s perspective.
The Composition of a Brilliant Double Act
What distinguishes The Christophers beyond a mere comic send-up through the contemporary art world is the extraordinary chemistry between McKellen and Coel. Their partnership constitutes the double act of the year, a showcase in opposing acting approaches that somehow harmonise perfectly. McKellen’s volcanic energy finds its perfect counterpoint in Coel’s carefully controlled restraint, generating a compelling friction that sparks through every scene. The film gains much of its substantial humour and emotional depth from watching these two performers engage with each other, their relationship shifting from employer-employee transactional coldness into something considerably more intricate and truly moving.
Sir Ian McKellen’s Irascible Brilliance
Ian McKellen’s portrayal of Julian Sklar is absolutely magnificent. The actor embodies the role of a once-dominant but now outmoded painter with total commitment, delivering brilliantly acerbic and irascible rants against everything that offends his sensibilities. His Julian is a man existing amid artistic disorder, reduced to recording Cameo videos for cash and peddling subpar contemporary pieces at roadside stunts. Yet McKellen imbues the character with such intellectual depth and dramatic panache that his bitterness never curdles into mere sourness; instead, his acerbic observations about the art world’s hypocrisies ring with unsettling authenticity.
McKellen’s finest accomplishment is portraying Julian with sympathy without ever diminishing his core personality. This is a genuinely dislikeable man—his grown children Barnaby and Sallie, played by James Corden and Jessica Dunning, are justifiably fearful of him. Yet the artist reveals the hurt dignity beneath the bravado, the real ability that has been rejected by fashion. His acting captures the distinctive pathos of the artist abandoned by time, become outmoded not through lack of ability but through the unpredictable character of popular taste.
Coel’s Cryptic Self-Control
Michaela Coel’s Lori Butler works in an entirely different register, and therein lies the genius of their pairing. Coel plays a ex-art student fallen on hard times, hired as Julian’s assistant by his self-interested children. She contains tremendous anger and passion within an mysteriously civil and fundamentally unreadable demeanour. This is a display of remarkable restraint, where Coel conveys volumes through minor variations in expression and thoughtfully measured silence. Her Lori unfolds slowly, reluctantly, as if each revelation costs her something dear.
What makes Coel’s work particularly impressive is her refusal to make Lori likeable through traditional means. She is not the dignified, downtrodden subordinate; she holds her own objectives, her own complexities. Yet Coel’s compelling composure engages us with her character’s psychological depth, making us invest in her endurance and ultimate victory. The moments shared by Coel and McKellen vibrate with wordless comprehension, a shared acknowledgement between two people trapped by circumstance, each discovering in the other an surprising echo of who they are.
Capturing Genuine English Character Via American Eyes
One of the film’s most remarkable achievements is how Soderbergh and screenwriter Ed Solomons—an American who happens to be John Cleese’s son-in-law—have crafted a vision of hauteur and English sensibility that rivals the finest examples of the genre. Their portrayal of Julian Sklar and the artistic sphere surrounding him evokes the same sophisticated understanding of English character and mannerism seen in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread and Robert Altman’s Gosford Park. The screenplay crackles with wit and linguistic exactitude, capturing the particular cadence of English complaint and the unstated class distinctions of class and taste that characterise the culture. What could have been a weary reflection on the contemporary art world instead becomes a rigorous exploration of obsolescence, pride, and the cold indifference of cultural fashion.
Soderbergh’s directorial vision amplifies this authenticity through his signature minimalist approach: intimate London locations, especially Julian’s tumultuous Bloomsbury residence, function as character explorations. The film moves with the pace and sharpness of a well-crafted literary novel, its narrative developments presented obliquely and without sentimentality. Every scene overflows with intelligence and dark humour, whether Julian is delivering toweringly witty rants against modern society or filming demeaning video messages for modest sums. The result is a film that feels distinctly English in sensibility whilst remaining accessible to international audiences, a uncommon juggling feat that Soderbergh executes with supreme mastery.
- Soderbergh’s US perspective delivers new insight to English artistic pretension and societal contradiction.
- The screenplay combines narrative complexity with biting comedy about aesthetic standards, worth, and cultural irrelevance.
- London’s intimate spaces and controlled approach create an distinctly English tone devoid of parody.
The Hunt for Missing Artwork and Profound Insights
At the core of The Christophers lies a deceptively straightforward concept that unfolds into something considerably complex and morally ambiguous. When Michaela Coel’s Lori Butler arrives at Julian Sklar’s crumbling Bloomsbury townhouse as his recently appointed assistant, she finds a man in freefall—creating degrading Cameo recordings for spare change, his recent paintings flogged at roadside stunts, his tax debts settled only by the ironic placement of one of his canvases in an HMRC office. Yet under this outward humiliation exists a more profound secret, one that Soderbergh and Solomons explore with characteristic wit and restraint. The film shifts into increasingly distant from the art world’s cruel indifference and more about what persists when reputation crumbles, and what truths might be hidden within the chaos of a brilliant man’s decline.
The relationship between Julian and Lori becomes the film’s emotional and cerebral engine, a interplay of shared acknowledgment between two people divided by generation and circumstance yet united through common ground. Coel’s performance is skilled in its control—she plays Lori as someone who conceals significant intellect and depth behind an impenetrable politeness, never quite revealing her hand. McKellen, by contrast, releases Julian’s cantankerous brilliance without permitting him to become just a cantankerous figure. Their interaction resonates precisely because neither actor overplays their hand; they traverse scenes with the precision of seasoned strategists, each line infused with subtext. What emerges is a portrait of creative authenticity under pressure, and the possibility of redemption through unforeseen connection.
A Manor of Mystery
Julian’s chaotic townhouse operates as far more than mere setting; it becomes a character unto itself, a tangible expression of a mind in disorder and a life lived according to aesthetic rather than practical principles. The squalor Lori encounters is not the result of idleness but of deep disregard to the material world—every surface laden with canvases, sketches, and the remnants of a life committed to art. Within these walls, Soderbergh reveals the visual vocabulary of deterioration and remembrance, transforming domestic chaos into something almost poetic. The house guards its secrets jealously, and as Lori navigates its labyrinthine spaces, the audience begins to sense that the real mystery here involves not just Julian’s past, but what he and his acquisitive offspring might be keeping from one another.
- Julian’s Bloomsbury townhouse embodies his creative deterioration and intellectual brilliance simultaneously.
- Lori’s arrival disrupts the carefully maintained secrets inside the decaying structure.
- The architectural setting serves as a canvas for exploring questions about obsolescence and artistic integrity.
- Suppressed secrets emerge gradually as the relationship of Julian and Lori deepens via collaborative uncovering.
Why This Film Is Important Today
In an era when modern art has become increasingly commodified and detached from genuine artistic vision, The Christophers offers a notably critical exploration of value, authenticity and cultural gatekeeping. Soderbergh and Solomons craft a narrative that interrogates who decides what art counts, and at what cost artists must sacrifice their creative vision to survive financially. Julian Sklar represents a particular British anxiety about obsolescence—the fear that one’s life’s work might be made obsolete by changing preferences and market forces. The film’s willingness to take this subject seriously, without descending into either pretension or cynicism, feels truly important at a moment when the art world is full of speculation, hype and the relentless pursuit of the next fashionable trend.
Beyond its specific focus on the art world, the film engages with wider issues about intergenerational conflict and the possibility of meaningful connection across difference. Lori and Julian’s relationship unfolds as a subtle challenge to the commercial character of contemporary life—a space where two people from vastly contrasting backgrounds find common ground through mutual intellectual engagement and mutual respect. In a cultural environment often characterised by cynicism and superficial interaction, this depiction of genuine human connection feels remarkably moving. Soderbergh demonstrates that cinema can still explore these delicate, intricate realities with wit, intelligence and emotional depth.