But Julian hasn’t painted in years. He makes money by recording crotchety Cameo videos—a feature of his standard template appears to include urging aspiring artists to just give up. He’s intensely focused, a little dotty, and very mean. Lori cagily tries to flatter him; he does all he can to make her go away, though he admits he’s susceptible to flattery. “I just need to believe it,” he purrs. Somehow he gives her permission to return the next day. In the interim, he finds out more about her and what she really thinks of him, though that only seems to make him respect her more. Meanwhile, she locates the unfinished Christophers canvases—they’re stashed in a bathtub in one of the house’s 1,001 cluttered rooms—and gets to work, though it’s not long before she decides to shift the course of her deception altogether.
The Christophers is a wily little movie. It’s not trying to be about anything, which means it somehow ends up being about lots of things. It’s about punctured pride, about the rarity of finding people who can call us on our baloney, about the meaninglessness of art that means nothing and the eternal value of art that speaks for itself, even in mysterious or muted ways. It’s about pettiness as one of the worst human traits, and generosity, even the grudging kind, among the best. The script is by Ed Solomon, not just a co-creator of the genius Bill & Ted movies, but also the screenwriter behind clever, enjoyable pictures like Men in Black and Charlie’s Angels. The pleasures of The Christophers involve following the cagey cat-and-mouse game Julian and Lori are playing, only to see it transform into an uneasy yet unbreakable union. In one scene, Julian tries, disingenuously, to dismiss one of his own works as meaningless, and Lori shocks him by articulating exactly how he has brought technique, form, and emotion together into an indefinably remarkable something. It’s a dazzling, high-wire monologue, and Coel delivers it as if she were riding a zephyr. She’s wonderful to watch—her cautious, skeptical eyes somehow tell us most of Lori’s story before it’s revealed to us in actual words. And she keeps up with McKellen without ever losing stride.
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