The Christophers Puts an Unrepentant Art Monster Through His Paces

Ian McKellen and Michaela Coel act out intergenerational warfare in Stephen Soderbergh’s art world drama.

Art, it has been said, is never finished, only abandoned. Steven Soderbergh’s new film, The Christophers, works around the edges of this idea. Its story of an elderly, dying painter who’s declined to complete his masterpiece unfolds as a sly, invigorating game of lost and found.

The idea of a protean, veteran creator waiting out his own private exile is fascinating on its own terms; it deepens nicely in the context of Soderbergh’s intense—some might say pathological—relationship to his own process and prolificacy. Soderbergh has won an Oscar and a Palme d’Or, and his films have collectively made billions, but his true identity is as the contemporary Renaissance Man of American Cinema. Since his 1989 debut, Sex, Lies, and Videotape—an analog-era allegory of both the insatiable desire to create and the ethical consequences of getting behind the camera—he’s directed 38 features in 37 years, a pace that puts even industrious indie-bred contemporaries like Richard Linklater to shame.

The number becomes even more astonishing when one considers that Soder­bergh “retired” from feature filmmaking for four years in the mid-2010s, citing a combination of burnout and disappointment with the diminished stature of his chosen medium. “I just don’t think movies matter anymore,” he told New York magazine in a 2013 interview that made international headlines. In addition to waxing philosophical (and more than a little cynical) about big-studio commercial calculus and waning mainstream attention spans, ­Soderbergh spoke extensively about his interest and inspiration from visual art; the interview was conducted in his painting studio near the Flatiron Building in New York City, a vivid backdrop for a chat that kept digressing into aesthetics.

“I go back and forth between portraits and abstracts,” he said of his paintings—though there is also a similar division in his cinematic oeuvre, with its share of intimate, close-up character studies (Erin Brockovich, The Informant!, Behind the Candelabra) and cool, distanced systemic analyses (Traffic, Contagion, High Flying Bird). But it’s another one of Soderbergh’s observations that seems to prefigure The Christophers. “When I think of a film I’m about to make,” Soderbergh mused, “I see a face with a certain expression on it.”

The expressions that Julian Sklar (Ian McKellen) paints in the film are, in a word, uncertain. In his series of portraits, also titled The Christophers, each frozen........

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