Resurgence: The Christophers

Michaela Cole and Ian McKellan in The Christophers. (Photo: Department M.)

There isn’t a sentimental moment in Ian McKellen’s portrayal of the artist Julian Sklar in Steven Soderbergh’s The Christophers. Julian is a painter in the sunset of his life who hasn’t made any new work in twenty years; he’s long since faded from celebrity, but a mystique remains around an unfinished series known as “the Christophers,” which he abandoned when he broke up with the lover to whom they were dedicated. His dreadful children (amusingly sketched by James Corden and Jessica Gunning), with whom he has apparently had no relationship for years, terrified that at his death they will be left without any inheritance, hire a young artist named Lori Butler (Michaela Coel) to forge finished versions of the paintings if indeed they exist at all, or to create them if they don’t. They persuade her to apply for the job of their dad’s new assistant in order to gain entrée to his studio. But though Lori has a history with Sklar that he is unaware of and that should definitely encourage her to take his children’s side – as a nineteen-year-old aspiring painter, she endured a withering critique by him on a TV show – her response to the young Sklars’ mission turns out to be very complicated. So is Ed Solomon’s intriguing screenplay, which weighs the questions of legacy and ownership in the arts and the bearing of the personal on the artistic as no movie has since Olivier Assayas’s Summer Hours in 2008.

Julian is a notoriously irascible and acerbic personality who has buried his bitterness about his past and his artist’s block in grandiloquent displays of abrasive wit that seems aimed at the few who manage to gain admission to the Victorian pile in which he has resided for years. This is one of those flamboyant roles actors wind up playing after they’ve become legends (or that may turn them into legends, like Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard), and they’re best approached, if at all, very carefully, with a wise blend of delicacy and humor, so they don’t molder into self-parody. Maggie Smith never made that mistake when she played Lady Violet Grantham on Downton Abbey, even when the writer, Julian Fellowes, excavated an ancient romance for her in the penultimate season; late in his remarkable career, Christopher Plummer found his way through a virtual solo portrait of John Barrymore (in Barrymore) and tracked Shakespeare’s Prospero with an almost supernal grace that sidestepped all the ways in which it could have been merely a turn with the affection of his audience built in. (I was lucky enough to see both these performances live, but fortunately they have been lovingly preserved on film.) Julian has a change of heart; the movie wouldn’t make much sense if he didn’t. But McKellen never goes soft. British acting training famously privileges the technical over the emotional. At least, that’s the accepted wisdom about the difference between it and Stanislavski, though surely that distinction was lost when the generation of English actors of whom McKellen is one of the last representatives came to the forefront in the sixties and you could see how they had absorbed the emotional energy of the Actors Studio performers, the first Method movie stars. And the more I watch the great English actors of the generation that preceded them, the more blurred the line seems: look at Edith Evans in The Whisperers or Peggy Ashcroft in The 39 Steps or, decades later, in The Jewel in the Crown and A Passage to India, or Robert Morley’s breakdown scene in The African Queen.

For McKellen, technique and emotion grow from the same roots. His rants in The Christophers are marvels of rhythmic invention. He seems to have taken apart the lines and restructured them; at first you think Sklar must have lost his way psychically and then you detect the logic, both intellectual and finally in terms of feeling, shaking inside the sentences like sand shimmering against an hourglass. You can hear the way he’s absorbed the lessons of the absurdists, too – no one who hasn’t played Beckett would be able to, or even think of trying to, sound the phrases in this weirdly curled way. And it doesn’t escape notice that Julian, however diminished, still embodies the jagged assault on bourgeois sensibilities that marks his rebel spirit. Both in the writing and especially in the performance, Julian Sklar is, I think, one of the great artist figures movies have given us, like Alec Guinness as the fictional Gulley Jimson in Ronald Neame’s film of Joyce Cary’s novel The Horse’s Mouth, Tim Roth as Van Gogh in Robert Altman’s Vincent and Theo and Timothy Spall as J.M.W. Turner in Mike Leigh’s Mr. Turner.

McKellen has attained the stature Laurence Olivier had in the seventies and eighties, when he had given so many classic performances covering such a bedazzling imaginative range that it seemed almost superfluous to call him the greatest actor in the world. McKellen is now that peerless magic maker. When he played Lear, I assumed that would go down in history as his most extraordinary achievement, but two summers ago I saw him play Falstaff in the West End in Player Kings, Robert Icke’s exquisite collage of the Henry IV plays – not a part I would have thought of him for – and halfway through I thought to myself, “Am I crazy, or is he is just as amazing as Falstaff as he was in Lear?” A few months ago he delivered a speech, widely ascribed to Shakespeare, known as “The Strangers’ Case” from the obscure seventh-century play Sir Thomas More on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, with a mastery that seemed to drip from him like raindrops; he virtually transformed the TV studio audience into the Olivier stage at the National Theatre. The material is a defense of immigration so the agenda for its inclusion was obviously topical, and yes, it’s a powerful piece of writing. But for me the wonder of it was in McKellen’s translucent reading.

Michaela Coel is a most unusual match for McKellen in The Christophers. As she plays Lori, the character has her own special mystery (she seems clearly to be on the spectrum), yet her acting has an unmistakable clarity. I would say that the film has two protagonists, both fighting toward resolutions that have eluded them both.

– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies.