Going the Way of the Lava Lamp
When we meet the great Julian Sklar, he isn’t so great anymore.
After a string of failed publicity stunts and a controversial television series plummeted his reputation, he now spends his days recording Cameo videos for cash, while his studio gathers dust around him. Locked upstairs in an attic room he hasn’t entered since the 90s are a half dozen canvases from his series The Christophers, portraits of a young man who has since disappeared.
Enter Lori Butler: a former artist, and present art restorer/food truck worker. When she is approached by her former classmate, one of the children of Julian Sklar, to become his assistant and secretly finish (read: forge) his paintings, Lori laughs in her face. Her companions know she loathes Sklar, and ask her to reconsider. With the promise of painting, cash, and the destruction of Sklar’s legacy, she accepts.
Once Lori goes undercover as the ailing artist’s assistant, he soon asks her to destroy them. Though the woman has a not-so-secret animus for the man, she begins to encourage him to finish the paintings himself.
The first impression of Julian Sklar’s house is that of a rabbit warren, hidden behind the exterior of two posh London townhouses.
One house is dark and cluttered, walls covered in framed photographs and art and the accumulation of eight decades of life. The other half is sun-bleached, titanium white and bone brittle. The houses are the visual representation of Julian’s mind– contrary, inconsistent, and filled with ephemera. Despite the clutter, Lori cuts a clear path upstairs, eye catching on important objects– an irreverent portrait, a Pride magnet, his famous first painting ‘Man in Cloud’– and slowly cuts through his bullshit like a knife through cold butter.
Julian Sklar is cantankerous and lonely and used to getting his own way. He is a bulldozer, barely acknowledging Lori but putting her straight to work, all the while talking incessantly. “My children say I never ask questions but I do,” he tells Lori after their first meeting. “I just don’t listen to the answers.”
While Julian is old, stubborn, and forgetful, he is still sharper than people expect. He knows his children want to sell his paintings after he dies, and after Googling Lori he not only reads her scathing article about his tarnished legacy, but interrogates her about it. And then he asks about her relationships, why she stopped pursuing art, and about why his children hired her, each time seeing through to the heart of the matter. Unlike his children, Lori notes this acumen in him, and gives it to him straight.
Lori is a turning point for Julian.
She is young and itching to create, and doesn’t let him hide. When he declares he wants to shred the Christophers, she pulls out the razor blade (though she forges copies first). When he wants to burn them instead, she brings them out to the firepit, but this time she tells him to get the matches. When he doesn’t, she asks why. She knows already, just as he does.
Julian cannot recreate the Christophers now that his muse has left. He has pretended for decades not to care about them to disguise that he cares so, so much, to the point he can’t bear to create something that feels like the original image. Lori sees this, too. So she tells him to do something different, hands him spray paint and glitter and feathers until a finished work is in front of him.
And then she leaves.
The Christophers was the first film I attended during the 43rd Annual Miami Film Festival, and it set the bar relatively high.
There were a lot of great components to this movie– the set design, the physicality, the dueling personalities played by Michaela Coel and Ian McKellen. The dialogue was clever, comedic, and perfectly executed. But I ultimately found the script dissatisfying. The stakes never felt that high in this movie– when Sklar’s conniving children try to blackmail Lori with previous forgeries, she shrugs it off. When Lori threatens to leave Julian, she comes back. When Julian fires Lori, he comes to her studio to apologize. Even the great revelation of the film, discovering that Julian had publicly mocked Lori on her Art Fight appearance, destroying Lori’s confidence and passion for art, lacked the gravity it should have held.
While I enjoyed this push and pull of two similar people and their mutual devotion, I was a bit disappointed that Soderbergh and Solomon didn’t dig deeper into the connections between them.
Particularly, I was really compelled by what it would have been like to be an out artist in the 90s. Julian flippantly tells Lori he was “bisexual before it was popular” after one of their conversations, but it is clear that this is no small matter to him. As he has lost his identity as an artist, he has shrunk himself down, his radical and queer identity reduced to dusty picture frames, a tiny pride flag in the foyer, a Pride magnet forgotten upstairs. Julian’s most significant muse was a younger queer man, whom he felt forever guilty for placing in the limelight and never spoke to again. He lived through the AIDS epidemic, and watched as a generation of queer men, fellow artists and friends, wasted away.
A central theme of The Christophers is that the community that should have been Julian’s is distanced from him, and the LGBTQ community is no exception.
His privileged, estranged children have no deeper understanding of his life and work. By contrast, Lori, a queer woman who works multiple jobs and lives in her ramshackle studio, resonates with him more closely than his own flesh and blood ever could. While his children wanted to sell his paintings to the highest bidder, Lori is able to see through him, able to reflect his transformations, pay homage to his legacy, and to share him with the world.
While Julian ultimately outlived his art, he did not outlive his legacy.
The ‘Inspired by Julian Sklar’ exhibit was such a beautiful touch to the movie’s conclusion. Rather than forging The Christophers in their old style to sell to the highest bidder, Lori ultimately creates collages in Julian’s new style, and donates the entire collection to Owen, the man who inspired the series. Together, they create an exhibit honoring their friend’s work. Lori also gave other artists who, like her, had been inspired by his work, a platform to share their passions and talents. Her own tribute, a reference to Sklar’s famous childhood work ‘Man in Cloud’, pulls from his greatest collection of final work, weaving his Cameo videos together in a digital exhibition.
I ultimately rated this film 4 out of 5 stars. While Coel and McKellen were truly excellent, the script lacked stakes and gravity and stopped it from making a permanent mark. After a number of critical flops, it is understandable why Soderbergh only ventured into the shallows, seemingly too scared to get into deeper water. But still, maybe he should take his own advice.
Maybe try a little glitter?