Once upon a time, this thoughtful character study would have arrived with a visible splash, and enjoyed a modest but well-deserved run at arthouse theaters.
Instead, it landed directly in streaming purgatory, likely never to be found by the potential audience that mainstream release would have attracted.
 |
| Understandably suspicious about the actual reasons for her having entered his life, Julian (Ian McKellen) tantalizes Lori (Michaela Coel) by showing her where he has stashed a long-unfinished series of paintings. |
Ed Solomon’s intriguing original script is essentially a two-hander that would have made a crackling stage play. Director Steven Soderbergh opens up the tableau a bit, granting us a sense of London’s bohemian Fitzrovia district, but our attention is held throughout by the enthralling performances from stars Ian McKellen and Michaela Coel.
McKellen effortlessly slides into the role of waspish, once-famous painter Julian Sklar, his glory years long behind him, all but forgotten and holed up in a pair of adjacent townhouses connected via their basements. (A droll running gag: Whenever anybody rings one buzzer, the intercom invariably responds with a testy “Other door!”)
Julian is best known to the current generation for his long run as the dismissive star of a cruel, long-running TV show, “Art Fight,” during which would-be artists submitted works live, on camera, hoping for praise and promise. More often than not, Julian instead delighted in cruel jokes and humiliating take-downs.
“A cry for help from the paint itself!” is just one example of his scornful assessments.
TV viewers apparently ate it up. (And they would, right? One can but shudder.)
Coel plays Lori Butler, an impressively educated art critic familiar with that world in general, painting and painters in particular, and — most pointedly — Sklar, who has been the focus of her withering published commentary for quite some time. She seems to have taken particular delight in detailing his progressive decline.
She’s also a part-time forger, which bespeaks considerable talent of her own.
We meet Lori first, when she’s approached by Sklar’s children, Barnaby and Sallie (James Corden and Jessica Gunning). The latter knows Lori from their days in art college, and somehow also is aware of her clandestine activities. They want Lori to take a job as Julian’s assistant, so that she’ll have access to a series of unfinished, long-abandoned canvases ... in order to complete them, so that Barnaby and Sallie will have a substantial inheritance when their father dies.
The canvases in question are the long-rumored third “Christopher Series,” which — if “suddenly” discovered stashed in Sklar’s townhouse, following his death — would be worth a fortune.
With just a few deft strokes, via dialogue and body language, Corden and Gunning establish Barnaby and Sallie as venal, grasping and thoroughly despicable clods.
