About a decade and a half ago (probably somewhere between 2013-2015), I attended a NerdNite lecture whose subject was Paul Cezanne’s Card Players. A princess from Qatar had just purchased it for approximately $250,000,000. The question we wanted to answer was why? What about this painting demands such a value? Directly below is said painting:
As you can tell just by looking at it, it is a painting of two men playing cards. Is it a decent portrayal of the same? Sure, I guess. I mean, it isn’t obviously bad. We could go through its details, it’s Post-Impressionist, its made with oils, Cezanne took this and that long to create them. None of that matters, at least not when we are talking about what makes a painting’s value rise over six figures. And you can’t just lay the blame at money laundering and dubious tax write-offs. This painting was purchased by this Qatari princess for the National Museum of Qatar, where if I am not mistaken, the general public can go see it. So, this princess really thought it was worth $250 million.
Two major things. One is fame. Cezanne is famous. Imagine a normal used toaster and how much you would pay for it. (Probably nothing, you would go buy a new toaster). Now, what if I told you that this toaster had been owned by Marilyn Monroe. Now how much would you pay for it? Some of these paintings that are bought for dumb amounts of money are not only painted by famous people, but then owned by famous people, multiplying the fame quotient when they are subsequently auctioned. But for Card Players probably the single most valuable thing about it was that it was one painting in a series of five paintings. And where are the other four Cezanne oil paintings of dudes playing cards? 1) The Barnes Foundation Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; 2) The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City; 3) the Musee D’Orsay in Paris, France, and 4) the Courtland Institute of Art in London, England. It seems that this princess thought that by purchasing the fifth Cezanne, she was acquiring prestige. Now, a Cezanne completist would have to travel to some of the world’s most prestigious museums in New York, Paris, London, Philadelphia to see them. And then also Qatar.
(Maybe also, having never worked a day in her life, the Qatari princess doesn't understand the value of money.)
The above should explain the behavior of the children of a famous artist Julian Sklar (played here by Ian McKellan) at the beginning of The Christophers. They are meeting with a little-known but talented artist Lori Butler (played by Michaela Coel) and proposing that she surreptitiously pose as an assistant for their aging father with the ulterior motive of completing a series of paintings, in storage in his attic, that he started and then abandoned a few decades ago. These paintings are “The Christophers" Series 3, which as is explained, is a set of paintings that themselves are the third installment of two previous series, which are already famous. One of the paintings from Series 2 has just sold for 2 million dollars. What makes up the value of a painting, as noted above, will explain why the paintings themselves don’t seem to matter. What is important is that Lori Butler use the old man’s paints and materials, that way when the completed paintings are “found” after the old man dies, they can be authenticated as his own. The story behind the paintings (they are portraits of a gay lover back when that was taboo), Sklar’s fame (he hosted a popular TV show called “Art Fight” in which he said mean things about amateur paintings), and the fact that they complete a series, is what makes them valuable. The children are confident, with good reason, that they will sell for millions regardless of what they look like. They’ll cut in Lori Butler for a third of it.
Dare I say, this ruse is the most interesting thing about the movie. The majority of it concerns conversations between Lori and Julian in which he pontificates about art and Lori has conflicting emotions about the scheme. Lori is a big fan and a talented artist, but she was once a contestant on “Art Fight”, wherein Julian joked and insulted her, and then thought so little of it that he doesn’t even recognize her when she shows up to steal from him. A fair amount of the movie concerns Julian directing Lori to destroy The Christophers, either by shredding them or by burning them, and her keen attempts to out-psyche and thwart his directives.
This is tiring. Why do we care whether The Christophers are shredded or burned? Would we feel bad for the children (played here by James Corden and Jessica Gunning) who would be denied an inheritance? No, of course not. Do we feel bad for the general public who won’t get to see the great art which is The Christophers, Series 3? Maybe, but are we sure? Because we never get to see The Christophers. So, what is convincing us that they have artistic worth? We just assume they have artistic worth because the characters describe them as having such. The writer/director Steven Soderbergh deliberately keeps the paintings out of view. In one elongated scene, Julian Sklar deliberately completes one of the paintings in a self-described awful fashion, applying pink paint, glitter, and feathers. I say self-described because Soderbergh keeps the camera behind the frame the entire time, so we never get to see what Julian is doing or how it turns out? Why don’t we get to see it? Isn’t that a telling choice?
The answer here is that if we could see the paintings, we could judge them for ourselves, and then we might have our own opinions about them. By keeping them out of our view, we have to play the movie’s game and assume what the characters are saying about them is true.
The problem here of course, and what makes art in general irritating, is that we have to listen to speeches about how the industry is hypocritical by characters that are hypocritical. Well, if we are denied the ability to judge the art on its merits, isn’t it the children that are the least hypocritical characters here? They, along with the movie, are the only ones who seem to intuitively know that it doesn’t matter what the paintings look like. And, let's be honest, you wouldn't make this movie about a not-famous artist who had a bunch of incomplete artwork in his attic. So, why do I have to sit through Julian Sklar’s sanctimony? Someday, I would like to see a movie about how rich people use high art to obtain tax write-offs. I still don’t completely understand how that is done. I bet that would be really interesting, at least more interesting than this.
I’m being harsh on the subject matter, not necessarily about its execution. Writer/Director Steven Soderbergh continues to show off his malleable style. Here is a man who directed Traffic, and Ocean’s Eleven, and Bubble, and Black Bag, amongst many others in his near 40-year career, who continues to operate towards the subject material, not the other way around. This is a conversational movie. Soderberg uses long takes and wide framing allowing the actors room to give expansive performances. Ian McKellan is 87 years old. Really, we should celebrate him for being upright and memorizing his lines. I’m not sure this is one of his best performances (I haven't seen enough of them), but it is good enough, and he is old enough (i.e. famous enough), to the point where it’ll likely land him a nomination. Michaela Coel is new to me (I know she has been around awhile) and I’m still undecided with her. James Corden does a great job of being greedy and shameless. He should be in more movies.
I don’t know what exactly happened at the end. One thing I am curious about is: who got paid and how much? The movie, hypocritically I believe, pretended not to care and aimed to keep it vague. But if that was the case, and they were being honest, the paintings would have been shredded and/or burned. Because we still don’t get to see the completed series. All we get to know about them is that they are now famous.
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