Review: Soderbergh’s “The Christophers”

Please stop making films about art

Synopsis: The Christophers centers on an aging painter, the younger woman drawn into his orbit, and the shifting power dynamics that emerge between them.

I have a rule: I never leave a cinema before the credits finish rolling. Not just because it feels disrespectful to the hundreds of people who worked on the film, but because I am attached to the ritual of moviegoing itself. Even terrible films deserve their final few minutes of darkness. Today, for the first time in my life, I broke that rule.

The culprit was not merely boredom, though Steven Soderbergh’s The Christophers supplies plenty of that. No, what finally drove me out of the theater was David Holmes’ music. A whimsical, faux-contemplative score that drifted over the film like the soundtrack to an airline lounge for emotionally avoidant people on ketamine. By the end, I felt less as though I had watched a film about art than endured a two-hour onboarding video for a luxury co-working space. I simply couldn’t take even three minutes more.

Not unlike Linklater’s Blue Moon, The Christophers belongs to that increasingly common category of prestige cinema in which filmmakers simply place a gifted actor in front of a camera and hope charisma will spontaneously generate a movie around him. This rarely works. Cinema is not alchemy. Presence alone is not structure. Halfway through the film I found myself asking the same question that has haunted me through so many recent critics’ favorites: who exactly is this for? Who the hell is moved by this? Who leaves the theater feeling more than mildly anesthetized?

What makes the failure especially irritating is that, much like Portrait of a Lady on Fire — a film I detest with a fervor bordering on the fanatical — the premise itself is genuinely promising. Questions of artistic legitimacy. Old age. Repression. Memory. Okay. There is a movie there. Potentially even a good one. But contemporary arthouse cinema has developed a remarkable talent for taking fertile material and embalming it beneath layers of self-importance. Everything here gestures toward seriousness, yet nothing feels serious at all : not the writing, not the performances, not even the actual subject matter.

Actress Michaela Coel, astonishingly, appears to have been directed according to one single instruction: do not move your face under any circumstances. The true protagonists of the film are her cheekbones catching soft window light at a forty-five-degree angle. She possesses so little discernible personality that she barely functions as a character at all; she exists primarily as an onscreen audience for the old painter’s endless pseudo-charismatic rants. And the flashback supposed to humanize her — the painfully obvious memory in which she is told she sucks at art — lands with all the delicacy of a bucket full of lead paint.

As for Ian McKellen? He’s a good actor. But didn’t we all know this already? By age ninety, one hopes an actor has earned the right to be choosier about the mausoleums in which he agrees to perform. Imagine this tepid schlock being the last contribution to one’s career? Shudder.

And then there is the film’s grand revelation, which — hang on to your hats — is so unbearably daring, I don’t think you’re ready for this: the young woman was smarter than the old man all along. What a SHOCKER. One can practically hear the standing ovation assembling itself in the heads of development executives.

The problem is not even the idea itself. Power games between older men and younger women can produce great cinema. The problem is that contemporary prestige filmmaking still presents this trajectory as revelation, long after it has hardened into formula. We are clearly meant to experience a thrill of subversion when the quiet muse turns out to possess agency after all, but by now the “girlboss takedown of the patriarchy” has become its own genre cliché: impeccably lit women softly reclaiming power while everyone speaks in murmurs about art and trauma. It is, at this point, its own form of oppression: mandatory coursework. This type of film should come with a voucher for one free psychotherapy session.

And here is what makes films like The Christophers feel so utterly bloodless despite their obsession with power: nobody in these movies behaves like an actual human being. Everyone speaks as though they have already undergone years of therapy and media training before the first scene even begins. Characters are lukewarm concepts politely illustrating a thesis, trapped inside a filmmaking style so committed to realism that it never notices how utterly unreal everyone is behaving.

I can’t say I really had any high hopes: my best experience with a Steven Soderbergh film took place recently, thirty thousand feet above the Atlantic, after two overly ambitious Bloody Marys, when I fell asleep halfway through Ocean’s Eleven and woke up to George Clooney smiling in a casino. Honestly, I could have stopped at that. But no, Steven, you had to go ahead and talk about art.

At this point, I have a modest proposal. Nobody should make films about art anymore. Painters, writers, sculptors, quirky geniuses staring out of windows while ambient music drones in the background — enough. The contemporary “film about art” has become one of the most lifeless genres in existence, endlessly confusing creative paralysis for profundity and long silences for good acting. Make movies about thieves again. About idiots. About heroes. About hopeless romantics. About people with bad instincts and impossible desires. About lost causes and glorious failures. The art world, meanwhile, might benefit from a temporary restraining order against filmmakers.

Can anyone tell me why people (or at least the critics) like these movies?? Is it just me?