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Speaker 2:
[00:20] In a terrific new film, The Christophers, an art restorer with a little background in forgery takes a job as an assistant to a once famous artist who's faded from public life, and her motives are complicated.

Speaker 3:
[00:32] It might seem like a quiet story, but the movie packs a serious punch of top-notch talent. The artist is played by Ian McKellen, the assistant by Michaela Coel, and the film is directed by Stephen Soderbergh. I'm Glen Weldon.

Speaker 2:
[00:44] And I'm Linda Holmes, and today we're talking about The Christophers of Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR.

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Speaker 2:
[02:08] Joining us today is our co-host Aisha Harris. Hello, Aisha.

Speaker 5:
[02:12] Hello, Linda.

Speaker 2:
[02:13] So, The Christophers begins with Michaela Coel as Lori, an art restorer who gets a call from a brother and sister played by James Corden and Jessica Gunning. They are the good-for-nothing children of the once very famous artist, Julian Sklar, played by Ian McKellen. They have no real relationship to speak of with their father and they're concerned they'll get nothing when he dies. So they have a proposition for Lori. She will get a job as Julian's assistant and she'll sneak up to his attic and complete several unfinished canvases from a series known as The Christophers. Then when Julian dies, these paintings will be discovered and they will reap the rewards. Lori decides to take the job, but when she meets the prickly Julian, he's not quite what she expects and the story of The Christophers gets tricky too. The movie is mostly a two-hander between Coel and McKellen and they are pretty great together. The film is in theaters now. Glen, I'm gonna start with you. Where did you come down on The Christophers?

Speaker 3:
[03:12] Came down pro, sadly pro. I haven't seen any reviews, but I know this thing is going to get called by some folks stagey. And you can kind of see it, I guess, because it is, what is it? It's two characters trading dialogue in a series of rooms. And that gets compounded by the fact that the dialogue is about fine art, which feels, you know, as a subject, kind of rarefied and erudite. And can I say elitist? Can I say tote baggy? A little, it's a little tote baggy. And I feel like we can say that. The calls are coming from inside the house. But I am so glad this is a film and not a stage production, because I worry that on stage, you might miss a lot of, most of, if not all of what Cole is bringing, because she's bringing it in the closeups. She is the real power in this pair of characters. And that's odd, because it seems like it's going to be McKellen at first, because his character is pontificating and bloviating, and it's really formative and very funny, but it soon becomes clear how much his character and the film itself and Soderbergh's camera is just obsessed with Cole's stillness, like this very self-possessed quality she's bringing. Because McKellen, his character is always fidgeting, and the handheld camera never stops moving, but Cole just plants herself in the center of this film, and everything kind of orbits around her. You know, that's aping the style of like cinema verite, oh, we're just finding the characters in these rooms, and we're using natural light, but make no mistake. When he is his own cinematographer, he credits himself as Peter Andrews, but it is Soderbergh. He knows how to light black skin, which shouldn't be a big deal in 2026, but you see people screwing it up all the time. And so much of this film takes place in the kind of planes of Cole's face that you just keep leaning in because you're waiting for her to react. And I don't remember this about her as an actor in things like Chewing Gum or I May Destroy You, but here she can be completely impassive, but not blank, right? The features are still, but the eyes are alive. And it's a great performance. I don't want to like slight what McKellen's doing because he was 85 when he made this. He's a grand dame of theater. He could have just chewed the scenery and gone home, but he is in those scenes with her. He is acting and reacting. He's alive in the moment. He's letting us see how much she's getting to Julian, even as Julian the character is endeavoring to hide that fact. As you say, what a great two-hander, a great little chamber piece, but I do think this is Coel's movie.

Speaker 2:
[05:38] Yeah, I think I agree with you. Aisha, what did you think?

Speaker 5:
[05:40] I don't use this word often, but I feel like this pairing is very sublime. It's very divine. There's something about how we learn about, especially Michaela Coel's character, and how she is coming at this job, this inside job, in a way that shifts over the course of the movie. I don't want to give too much away. What I love about the performance there, and Glen's already said a lot of what I was going to say, but this is a story about someone who is an artist, and a claimed artist, a white male artist. Then you have someone who we find out over the course of the film that she is an artist herself, but that it's complicated by the fact that she's not actually practicing her own art in the same way that I think she intended to set out to do. So there's these questions about what makes an artist, is forgery, even if you're really good at it, is that actually art? And there's all these questions that I think are really interesting. I'm not sure if it answers all of those, but I do think what I love about this is that this is one of the better dramatic interpretations of ideas around quote unquote cancel culture and around generational divides between artists and between people in general. And what I really appreciate about this film is the fact that it tries to do those things, but it also does things in a Soderbergh way. I think Soderbergh is one of my favorite filmmakers. If you look at his entire sort of catalog, he has done almost every kind of movie you could possibly think of, like maybe except like a Western or something. But he's done heist movies, and this is a heist movie, but it's not a heist movie. And that is for me, it's a quiet movie. It's not Ocean's Eleven. It's not flashy. And what I love about it is that quietness, that stillness. And I also will say, I think many of us like to sort of hate on James Corden, for legit reasons. Like he's actually perfectly cast here. Just the right amount of him. And also, he's leaning into like smarm in a way that works really well.

Speaker 3:
[07:38] Peak deployment, yes. Peak deployment of James Corden.

Speaker 2:
[07:41] I heard somebody say about him once that if he's used in situations where he's supposed to be unappealing, he can be very, very good. It's when you use him in a way where he's supposed to be ingratiating, that his entire persona seems to kind of backfire and not really work.

Speaker 5:
[08:00] Exactly.

Speaker 2:
[08:01] Yeah. I really, really liked this too. You've both sort of alluded to some of these elements, but one of the things I like about this story is that there's such a good balance between Laurie eventually comes to understand that she's dealing with this old man, who is nearing the end of his life. Even though he's kind of a misanthrope, he's also actively lonely. And I think the movie finds a way to navigate those things and sort of allow her to understand them without her kind of letting him off the hook for all the things he's ever done and all the ways he's ever behaved and sort of said, none of this is your responsibility. It's okay, let me give you a hug, blah, blah, blah. She just understands that she is dealing with a man who, you know, his queerness has, you know, led to a lot of complexities in his life. As he says at one point, I'm bisexual and was when that still cost something, I think he says, something almost, yeah. She understands that element of it. There are several moments where she kind of draws lines and you can understand her saying, you can do this up to this point, but if you do this, I'm going to leave because it's not immediately obvious at the beginning, what he actually needs an assistant for, because his kids want her to go obviously, so she can forge these canvases, complete these canvases and pretend he did it. But from his perspective, there's a little stuff about cataloging his stuff, but it seems like it's more, he really wants company, but he has trouble acknowledging that he wants company. So she shows up and he's kind of testing whether he can get her to stay and be company, I don't know, I think that opening section where it seems like he's just trying to kind of push her out the door, but he doesn't really want her to leave, I found that fascinating.

Speaker 3:
[09:57] There are moments that McKellen lets us see where he realizes that his pattern, his usual approach isn't working with her and they both register it in different ways. So he becomes curious about her in a way, it's clear this character has not been curious about other people in a long time. And this screenwriter is Ed Solomon who has worked with Soderbergh before, but this is the Bill and Ted guy. This is the now you see me guy. He started out writing for Laverne and Shirley. And what we have here, I don't want to oversell it for people who haven't seen it, but this isn't Stopper, this isn't Albee. I think the subject matter can convince you that it's working at a different level than it might be, but he is very clearly a student of those writers. He nails the contours and the rhythms in a way that I think is going to reward success of viewings. I mean, I keep going back to things like Arcadia and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and Virginia Woolf and Three Tall Women, not because the dialogue is so dense and it's hard to unpack, but because it's so pleasurable to listen to and to watch and to read. And I think I'm going to be coming back to this film a lot.

Speaker 5:
[11:00] Well, I think it's also just like, yes, it's part of that, as Linda was saying, it's him trying to test her out, but also he's just like a very suspicious person. You know, like he despises, he has so much dripping, oozing content for his two children. Like at one point he says like, I had nothing to do with how they are, they're awful. And it's like, that's supposed to be both like a flex, but also it's like, but that means you were not in their life at all. Right. Like you were not actually a good parent. So like, there's moments where I think yes, it's true that to some extent he's testing her, but he's also just very suspicious. And this is a portrait of a man at the end of not just his life, but who's long past his prime of his career and knows it. And you can tell he has a lot of self-contempt too. He is constantly talking about how it's been 30 years since the last time he did anything of notes or at all really, he's kind of stopped doing the art. And it's very interesting to see that sort of self-loathing play out with someone who was much younger, and also has their own feelings about this person, even though they've just meeting them for the first time, but she has her own reasons for even taking this job. And I just find that so fascinating to see how they both kind of like, of course, they eventually kind of soften towards each other. That's the natural progression. You know that's probably where it's gonna end up. But the journey there is the fun. There's just so much character study going on here that I find so fun. And Glen, I have seen this now twice in the second rewatch was even more rich. There were so many more things I could notice and see and dig into from those performances and from what sort of the camera is doing. The camera is very subtle, but Soderbergh's talked about how he, for most of the movie, if you're outside of the house, you're looking at the studio and the dollies and all that stuff. And when you're inside the house, with one exception, you see handheld so you can move easily through the room. You can move over past their shoulders. You can follow Ian McKellen. You can follow Michaela Coel as they're. And the house is just beautifully. I love the house. Like it's a townhouse. It's an English townhouse. It is exactly what you might think an artist's townhouse would look like. Cluttered but chic, like cluttered but like nice contemporary. Everything has a place, but it still feels like kind of overwhelming. Yeah, no, I just really love this movie. It's just exactly what I want from both these performers and from Soderbergh.

Speaker 2:
[13:30] One of the other things I noticed is that when you see Lori in the house, a lot of the time, the way that she is dressed, the fabrics and the colors are very in harmony with the house. She seems to belong there. There's a scene in particular when she's going up to try to figure out where the Christophers are and get a look at them and everything. You really can notice that she, at least at particular points in the story, the look of this very warm, especially up in that attic where these canvases are, the sunlight's very, very warm. Everything is these rich browns and oranges and creamy colors. There's one scene, if you watch for it, the way she's dressed is meant to, I think, it conveys that she fits into this attic. Because of the commonality that they're, to me, it makes sense because it's a very artisty place, whether you're him or whether you're her. The other thing I really appreciated about this is that, if you're going to make a movie about art, especially a movie that has an art forger in it, you wonder, am I going to get a lot of heavy-handed stuff about forgery and art and theft and fraud and all that stuff? What I would say is you don't, you get a light but interesting interrogation of things like, why is art so expensive in certain circumstances? There's an interesting conversation at one point between two characters about sort of, who does it benefit if you reveal that something is forged, right? Does it do something for the artist? Does it do something for the person who owns the piece? Does it do something for the maybe gallery that sold the piece or does it hurt everybody? I think there are some interesting conversations around all of that stuff. Why if these canvases are finished, they would be so incredibly valuable. But why is that? Like I said, there's some consideration of those things. But I think it is allowed to stay in the back seat compared to this character play that's going on between these two people. Because it's impossible for me to imagine this with anyone else in either of these parts. I'm sure it could in an alternate universe. I guess you could do it and then it would make sense to me. It's impossible for me at this point to imagine anybody else in either of these two parts.

Speaker 5:
[16:09] Well, it's interesting that you say that Linda, because Ed Solomon has said that they wrote this with these exact two actors in mind, which rarely happens, right? Where it actually goes from like, this is who I had in mind and then you're able to actually get those people to work together and put this thing together.

Speaker 2:
[16:25] Makes sense though.

Speaker 5:
[16:26] It makes sense. You can see it and it really does, I think, benefit, like Ian McKellen obviously at this point, he's been doing this for decades and Michaela Coel, I think is still somewhat new to people. But having seen what I have seen of her, including I May Destroy You and Chewing Gum, I think both these actors have a ability and a willingness and desire to play and understand how acting can be fun. I mean, this is a comedy, but even though it does have those comedic moments, you can see how these two people can really gel together on screen. I think of even when we get to the point where they finally are seeing eye to eye, or when they have this banter, and it could easily get into between like, oh, look at these two generations coming together. But it stays grounded, it stays true, and it also stays a little spicy because part of it is that neither of them like Barnaby and Sally.

Speaker 2:
[17:23] Those are his kids.

Speaker 5:
[17:25] Yes, his kids. So that coming together out of both spite and also just like, these people, they don't understand art. We understand art in a way. That understanding how they get to that point, I think it's just so, it gels and it works to that point. Again, seeing people who were intended for these roles, that's the magic of that. That's what can happen when that does actually take place.

Speaker 3:
[17:48] Yeah. As the relationship shifts over the course of the film, it does change the tension of the film. Just on the first watch, I will just say, in a movie this talky, it's weird to talk about pacing. There is a certain lassitude that kind of creeps into the movie around, in my notes, it's around the 80-minute mark. It makes a show of kind of starting to wind down, but it takes its time doing so. I don't think that's going to be an issue when I see this film again because I'll know where the contours, where it's headed. So I'll be along for the ride there.

Speaker 2:
[18:15] It's also not long. It's basically an hour and a half.

Speaker 3:
[18:17] It's basically an hour and a half or so. I'm in for it and I think the shifting of those tensions will register differently the second time you see it.

Speaker 2:
[18:26] Yeah. I agree with you. I think we all really liked this movie and I do encourage you to seek it out. As we said, it's in theaters. I'm sure it will be available elsewhere later. The Christophers, just keep it in mind. We all liked it. Big recommendation from us. That brings us to the end of our show. Aisha Harris, Glen Weldon, thank you so much for being here to chat about this movie. Thank you.

Speaker 5:
[18:47] Thank you.

Speaker 2:
[18:48] Just a reminder that signing up for Pop Culture Happy Hour Plus is a great way to support our show and public radio, and you get to listen to all of our episodes sponsor free. So please go find out more at plus.npr.org/happyhour, or visit the link in our show notes. This episode is produced by Mike Katzoff and Hufza Fathima, and edited by our show runner, Jessica Reedy. Hello Come In provides our theme music. Thanks for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Linda Holmes and we'll see you all next time.

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