The Couple Behind Considered one of Historical past’s Most Brazen Artwork Heists
The Thief Collector is just not what you would possibly anticipate. Sure, it’s yet one more sensational artwork heist documentary (a descriptor which will make museum directors cringe) however the theft of a multi-million-dollar portray is barely the entry level into the movie. The true thriller at its coronary heart isn’t in regards to the theft — it’s in regards to the thieves.
A seemingly docile band trainer and a speech pathologist from New York Metropolis, Jerry and Rita Alter reside for the adventurous worldwide journeys they take each few months. The couple goes away for weeks at a time to “unique” locales and comes house with memento tchotchkes, artifacts, artworks, and epic slideshows that take a look at the persistence of their family and friends. Exterior their prolonged holidays, the Alters have an effect on a modest presence, and nobody questions how they fund their extravagant trip behavior on two public college educators’ salaries.
Upon retiring, they transfer to the tiny city of Cliff in New Mexico’s sparsely populated southwest nook, not removed from Tucson. On Black Friday, 1985, the Alters go to the College of Arizona Museum of Artwork (UAMA) and commit one of the crucial audacious artwork thefts in current reminiscence.
The Thief Collector, directed by Emmy-winning documentarian Allison Otto, begins with the 2017 sale of the Alter’s property and the story of how the unwitting proprietor of Silver Metropolis, New Mexico-based Manzanita Ridge Furnishings and Antiques, David Van Auker, got here into possession of “Lady-Ochre” (1955), a Willem de Kooning portray value an estimated $160 million that went lacking from the UAMA 32 years prior. When a buyer at Manzanita Ridge notices the portray and asks if it’s a actual de Kooning, Van Auker realizes what he has and is raring to return it.
The portray is returned to UAMA after which despatched to Los Angeles’s J. Paul Getty Museum for restoration. What follows is a collection of unusual twists suggesting the de Kooning theft wasn’t the Alters’ solely — or most sinister — crime.
In her analysis, Otto found a manuscript that reads like a confession with a aspect of fantasy. In 2011, Jerry Alter self-published a text-book-sized assortment of brief journey tales referred to as The Cup and the Lip (maybe derived from the saying ‘there’s many a slip ’twixt the cup and the lip’ which is roughly equal to ‘don’t depend your chickens earlier than they’ve hatched’). Within the preface to the textual content, Jerry says he “labored to keep up a reference to actuality” by basing his tales round private experiences.
The Cup and the Lip turns into a supply for hypothesis in regards to the Alters’ alter-egos. The movie’s latter half presents a number of theories in regards to the couple’s potential soiled deeds, backed by too-convenient coincidences. The theories are scandalous and juicy, however because the deceased couple can’t be interrogated, nothing might be confirmed.
Glen Howerton (It’s All the time Sunny in Philadelphia) and Sarah Minnich (Higher Name Saul) ham it up in a collection of madcap recreations of the Alters’ alleged escapades. These scenes — a pleasant disruption in a movie that will get progressively darker by the second — are composed with a Wes Anderson-esque aptitude, illustrating the capricious self-aggrandizing components of Jerry Alter’s autofictions.
The Thief Collector is an entertaining and intriguing movie that can alternately have audiences laughing, cringing, and indulging in conjecture in regards to the UAMA theft and the thieves behind it. The story of Jerry and Rita is unfinished and sure unfinishable. Nonetheless, the cliffhanger conclusion of this part-thriller-part-documentary will certainly encourage extra questions in regards to the ostensibly quiet couple hiding darkish secrets and techniques within the New Mexico desert.
The Thief Collector might be launched in early 2023.