Steven Soderbergh is a man of both expedience and innovation. In the last 15 months, he’s had three films in theaters — “Presence,” “Black Bag” and now, “The Christophers” — all with their own unique directorial style and individual ambitions. “Presence” was a ghost story about teenage loneliness, filmed from the perspective of a spirit haunting the house a grieving family has just moved into. “Black Bag” tore up spy movie conventions with its emphasis on fidelity in the field, becoming one of the genre’s most scintillating new films in years. And with “The Christophers,” Soderbergh unhurriedly wades through the art world with a sweet tale of a fading painter, Julian Sklar (Ian McKellen), and his new assistant, Lori (Michaela Coel), who’s been covertly hired by Julian’s children to finish (aka forge) the last of his most beloved series of portraits.
Throughout the film, the question of what gives art its value appears in several forms, challenged by Lori and Julian when their initially stilted working relationship transforms into something more intimate. As they grow closer, Lori wonders if the difference between restoration and forgery becomes moot when the person working to complete a half-finished work of art, in the original artist’s style, is doing so with the artist’s blessing. The film, written by Soderbergh’s frequent collaborator Ed Solomon, quietly asks the questions confounding creatives in the tech-obsessed age. For those concerned that artistic prowess is being deprioritized for AI, and filmmaking might soon become just another piece of content creation, left to fight for its existence in a sea of vertical videos, “The Christophers” is a modern and compelling interrogation of the future.
