SXSW Film Review: The Thief Collector

There are a great deal of questions swirling around the events of The Thief Collector, the latest documentary from Alison Otto (“The Love Bugs,” “Property”). And while most of them remain unanswered by the film’s end, there is no shortage of theories set forth by the film’s participants.

What is known is this: On November 29th, 1985, Willem de Kooning’s painting “Woman-Ochre” was stolen from the University of Arizona’s Museum of Art in Tucson during business hours. The theft was much publicized, as the painting was quite expensive. In 2017, the painting was found in Cliff, New Mexico hanging on a wall in the residence of Jerry and Rita Alter, both deceased. The painting was found by the antique dealers who had bought the estate. The dealers, nice guys that they are, returned the de Kooning to the museum. The FBI show up to investigate. Things become strange and complicated.

At the center of Otto’s film is Jerry and Rita. Were they a mildly eccentric and interesting couple who worked in education and enjoyed a life of world travel, or were they brazen art thieves who lived for the rush of adrenaline that these heists provided? Why not both? Secret, double lives are always intriguing stories because, well, don’t we all have one, if just in our head? And since Jerry’s head was filled with a desire to write short stories that he published in a massive collection, a number of which contain uncanny similarities supporting this exciting and dangerous double life that he Rita may have shared, well isn’t that proof enough? Otto adapts a few of these stories for us, especially the de Kooning heist, using actors and a snappy Hollywood style, and they are The Thief Collector’s high point.

The film leads us into increasingly more implausible warrens (Did Jerry murder an undocumented worker on his property? Was Rita the model for “Woman-Ochre?”), before circling back to the central question of the couple’s motive for the crime. A certain obsession with a life they were never able to attain appears to be the consensus among the The Thief Collector’s talking heads, but like the FBI’s analysis of the evidence against Jerry and Rita Alter, the film remains “compelling but not definitive.”

Don't miss our interview with director Allison Otto, "Ordinary People, Exceptional Thieves," March 11.

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The Thief Collector

Documentary Feature Competition, World Premiere
Monday, March 15, 12:30pm, 1pm, Violet Crown
Thursday, March 17, 2:15pm, Alamo Lamar
Online: March 14, 9am-March 16, 9am