Steven Soderbergh 'The Christophers' is something of a heist film

Sir Ian McKellen has been loaning his Shakespearean gravitas to franchise films for so long it’s easy for movie audiences to forget how marvelous he can be when he’s asked to actually act. Later this year, the 86-year-old actor will be playing “X-Men” villain Magneto for the sixth time in the fifth “Avengers” movie, and he’s recently signed on to play the wizard Gandalf again in a seventh “Lord of the Rings” film. This sort of thing often happens to master British thespians, which is why most of their obituaries now begin with the words “Harry Potter actor.” It’s how I grew up knowing Laurence Olivier as Zeus from “Clash of the Titans.” It’s also why Steven Soderbergh’s new film “The Christophers” comes as such a sweet relief, because it reminds us of everything McKellen can do when he’s not stranded in front of a green screen.

The stage legend stars as Julian Sklar, a disgraced former titan of the modern art world now living as a curmudgeonly semi-recluse in South London. There was a time when Julian was a giant, but he quit painting and became an embittered sellout, more famous these days for firing off catty put-downs as the designated mean judge on an “American Idol”-esque reality competition show called “Art Fight!” than for his life’s work. Imagine if David Hockney had become Simon Cowell and you get the drift.

Much to the chagrin of his estranged, swinish children, played with appropriate awfulness by Jessica Gunning and McKellen’s “Cats” co-star James Corden, Julian has squandered his vast fortune, living on the meager money he makes recording Cameos for die-hard fans who’ve stuck with him through the scandals. But stashed away somewhere in his cluttered flat are four unfinished paintings from the end of his most acclaimed artistic period, portraits of his former lover Christopher that Julian was too heartbroken to complete.

The rotten kids have hired a down-on-her-luck art school colleague named Lori (Michaela Coel) to find and forge the missing Christophers to completion, so they can “discover” and sell them for millions after their father finally dies. Like a lot of Soderbergh’s films, “The Christophers” is something of a heist picture, requiring Lori to infiltrate the old man’s apartment by applying to be his new assistant. The job interview — if one can even call it that — is a magnificent 7-minute monologue by McKellen in which he swans around his studio, passively-aggressively denigrating his applicant while puffing up his own ego. He’s appalling, and also hilarious.

Coel is a perfect foil. At first, she registers as impassive, almost sphinx-like, with his offensive zingers ricocheting right off her into the ether. But there’s far more to this young woman than she’s letting any of us see at first glance. The trick to Ed Solomon’s witty and literate screenplay is that it allows these characters to keep surprising us, the big twists coming not from the smoothly engineered cons that drive the story, but rather from the personalities behind them. Solomon also wrote Soderbergh’s nifty 2021 noir “No Sudden Move,” a sharp and socially conscious throwback that sadly got lost in the pandemic slurry of streaming titles.

Julian Sklar is McKellen’s best movie role since his turn as lovesick director James Whale, longing for his gardener Brendan Fraser in 1998’s “Gods and Monsters.” We get glimpses of the fear and self-loathing behind this artist’s arrogance. Julian is a master self-saboteur who blew up his own career before the audience had a chance to turn on him, as audiences inevitably will when you’re as famous as he was. He’s one of those people who’ll preemptively reject you because he’s afraid of you rejecting him, a guy who abandoned his calling at the height of his powers because he couldn’t bear the indignity of losing a step. In Lori, Julian is faced for the first time with someone unwilling to play along with his psychological games.

“The Christophers” is an extremely funny movie, with McKellen making meals out of the character’s inappropriate workplace proclamations. Whether lamenting how Harvey Weinstein ruined everything for men who like to conduct business in their bathrobes, or needling Lori’s unconventional romantic situation by noting that he himself was “part of a throuple back when it was called infidelity,” he takes a dirty old man’s delight in tweaking the younger generation’s propriety. McKellen has the twinkle in his eye of an incorrigible scamp, trying to quip his way through his new assistant’s impervious facade.

Underneath the character comedy lie serious concerns about authorship and legacy. The film concedes that there’s a real art to forgery, and in its later reels, “The Christophers” kicks around questions of how much authenticity truly matters, and to whom. Some of the conclusions the movie comes to may surprise you, and might make some purists want to pull their hair out. (It’s actually not too shocking in light of recent controversial statements Soderbergh has made regarding generative AI and his plans to incorporate it into future projects. He’s hardly a hardliner on such matters, especially when there’s a new toy to be played with.)

Soderbergh is a staggeringly prolific artist. “The Christophers” is his 37th feature in 37 years, and that’s not counting his extensive television work. Acting as his own cinematographer, editor and camera operator, he’s always trying to find the most concise way to cover a scene, putting the story across with as few shots and movements as possible. Sometimes he can fall too in love with his visual conceits, as in last year’s gimmicky ghost story “Presence.” But there’s nothing showy about “The Christophers” because there doesn’t need to be. From the moment Lori steps into Julian’s cluttered apartment, Soderbergh’s camera is locked in on these two actors like he doesn’t want to miss a thing. Neither do we.

“The Christophers” is now in theaters.