THE THIEF COLLECTOR - Mark Reviews Movies

The Thief Collector, FilmRise

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 18, 2023

Truth can be stranger than fiction, and in The Thief Collector, some strange fiction might point toward even stranger truths. One has to clarify that this might be the case, because much of Allison Otto's documentary, which begins with a short story about a stolen painting and a real case of art theft that apparently did a lot more than inspire that story, amounts to a lot of speculation. It's fascinating and sometimes convincing speculation, to be sure, but even the most tantalizing of hypotheses are still in need of some hard evidence.

It's a good thing, then, that Otto isn't an attorney and this movie isn't a courtroom. It's probably better for the filmmaker that her subjects, a married couple who likely committed various crimes of varying degrees of severity, are dead, lest Otto end up in a courtroom for a defamation lawsuit. To be fair, Jerry and Rita Alter would probably be in prison for the crime they almost certainly committed and to which the former basically admitted by way of a work of fiction. The real question is how much more either or both of them might have confessed over the course of any legal proceedings.

A shorter point is that Otto has assembled a fairly entertaining account of what she and many others believe to be the story of career criminals who got away with a lot. The most convincing case is that of the theft of a painting by William de Kooning, which was stolen in 1985 and discovered in 2017 in the late Alters' home. If the painting were a gun, it would be smoking.

Otto interviews relatives and friends of the Alters, who explain how inconspicuous the two were—save for the extravagant vacations they somehow took on teachers' salaries—over the course of their lives, and the people who found the de Kooning painting and who started investigating what else the Alters might have been up to. The main hook is a collection of short stories that the husband wrote, with family and friends testifying to the fact that some of those stories reflect some anecdote the Alters mentioned about their adventures. If some of them are based in reality, is the one in which a jealous married man murders an undocumented migrant founded upon some personal experience, too?

Otto's approach to the narrative is nimble and clever (The re-creations of both the Alters' lives and the short stories feature Glenn Howerton and Sarah Minnich, having devious fun as the couple). As the theories—about possible crimes and the psychology of these two—becomes grander, though, the evidence becomes thinner (One scene follows a scan of a septic system for so long that all the possible suspense is drained of it). The Thief Collector is a strange ride, but even a passing thought reveals that it tells us little of any real substance.

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