The Thief Collector, 2022.
Directed by Allison Otto.
Starring Glenn Howerton, Sarah Minnich, Scott Takeda, and Matt Pittenger.
SYNOPSIS:
In 1985, Willem de Kooning’s “Woman-Ochre,” one of the most valuable paintings of the 20th century, was cut from its frame at the University of Arizona Museum of Art. 32 years later, the painting was found hanging in a New Mexico home.
Allison Otto’s debut doc The Thief Collector may present an unavoidably incomplete story that leaves so many questions unanswered, but it’s an incredible, well-told tale all the same, ultimately powered in part by its own agonising ambiguity.
Otto’s film centers around the 1985 theft of Willem de Kooning’s painting “Woman-Ochre,” which at the time was valued at $400,000 and is today worth $160 million. After being cut from its frame at the University of Arizona Museum of Art and disappearing without a trace, Woman-Ochre was recovered some 32 years later from the home of a recently deceased New Mexico couple, Jerry and Rita Alter.
And so Otto speaks to the Alters’ friends and family, as well as the authorities and those on the ground when the painting was first recovered, to try and make sense of the how and why this unassuming couple allegedly liberated de Kooning’s painting from its home and secretly stashed it in their own for decades.
It’s an inherently fascinating crime and an especially bold one because the Alters seemingly didn’t steal the painting in order to make a fortune selling it. If they did steal the painting as it seems they did, they’re among the rarest of art thieves who steal simply for the pleasure of it, to possess the work themselves and deprive the wider world from it. As one investigator tells us, these are typically the toughest thieves to catch because their exposure is so minimal – hence why Woman-Ochre was only recovered following the Alters’ demise.
Because Jerry and Rita have since passed away, there’s an elusiveness to their story that will be forever impossible to reconcile, forcing Otto to turn to those closest to the pair to offer their own conjecture. Yet even their immediate relatives often struggle to resolve the people they knew with their seemingly secret life as globe-trotting art thieves.
Attempts to parse the couple’s psychology are fitfully interesting, though occasionally veer into the realm of outlandish conspiracy theory, and in one mildly tacky sequence there’s even the suggestion that Jerry could have been a murderer – an investigation that goes nowhere and feels like an attempt to pad the runtime.
Though a book of short stories that Jerry wrote about the adventures of various couples suspiciously similar to himself and his wife seem to provide some slivers of truth, even that quasi-confession can’t be taken at face value given the clear fusion of truths, half-truths, and outright fantasy within it.
Yet while the lack of clarity may threaten to be unsatisfying, the unknowable why becomes itself a fascinating talking point, of how the mysteries people leave behind can themselves be a legacy that keeps them “alive” years after they’re gone. If that was Jerry’s intent, then he most certainly succeeded.
Beyond the various talking heads interviews, Otto includes amusing spoof-style recreations of various zany stories from Jerry’s book, with Glenn Howerton and Sarah Minnich portraying sexed-up versions of the couples, and Howerton also narrating choice passages. These asides help break up the more standard, unfussed presentation otherwise, even if they’re hardly “necessary” to tell this story.
All in all this is an enjoyably lightweight doc that doesn’t engage much with its tale’s wider themes – namely the questionable “value” we as a society ascribe to fine art – but digs playfully into the enticing ongoing enigma of its focal couple. While not fully exploiting its stranger-than-fiction story, The Thief Collector is a documentary as entertaining as it is odd.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★
Shaun Munro – Follow me on Twitter for more film rambling.
