Helen Archer | On 02, Apr 2024

Director: Allison Otto
Cast: Glenn Howerton, Sarah Minnich, Scott Takeda, Matt Pittenger
Certificate: 12

When she died in 2017, Rita Alter left behind an innocuous-seeming ranch house in the tiny township of Cliff, New Mexico, situated some 50 miles from the nearest interstate. It was filled with the various artworks and artefacts she and her late husband, Jerry – who had died 5 years previously – had collected from their extensive travels around the world. Jerry also fancied himself as a painter, and his own work predominately adorned the walls: brightly coloured abstracts that can only be described as an acquired taste.

It was a lot for their extended family to deal with, and they ultimately called in an art and antique dealership to sift through the estate, who would take with them anything they thought they might be able to sell. Tucked behind the door of the Alter’s bedroom, the men from Manzanita Ridge Furniture & Antiques in Silver City found a framed painting unlike the rest of the artwork, though, to the dealers, no less divisive a painting than those of Jerry’s. They chose to take it back to their shop, in the back of their van.

Within 10 minutes of hanging it on their wall, they were offered $200,000 for it. It was, it turned out, Woman-Ochre, an original 1955 de Kooning, stolen from the University of Arizona’s museum in 1985 and now worth in the region of $160 million. Rita and Jerry Alter were outed, posthumously, as the thieves who had pulled of the audacious art theft, cutting it from the frame in broad daylight, before beetling off in their red sports car.

This feature-length documentary, directed by Allison Otto, talks to the people who discovered the painting, as well as some of those who investigated the original theft. But it interviews, too, the Alters’ family – though not their two children – and their friends and acquaintances to get a fuller picture of who they were. A seemingly unassuming, yet eccentric couple – he a sax player and music teacher, she a speech therapist – the couple would go on three or four exotic holidays each year, after their retirement, though it was not known how their modest means could afford them such luxury. Jerry had aspirations to be a writer – as well as his many paintings, he left behind hefty manuscripts of short stories, which detailed apparently wild tales of jewel heists, tribal massacres and, in one case, the murder of an itinerant worker in New Mexico (his body thrown into a septic tank just like the one in the garden of the Alters’ Cliff home, which they had refused to have serviced for 40 years).

Some of Jerry’s stories are delved into by the documentary, complete with kitsch re-enactments and voiceovers. How much of Jerry’s ‘fantasy life’ was fantasy, and how much was real? How many of their ‘replica’ artworks were, in fact, replicas? These are questions the documentary asks, but never fully answers. Nor do we get to the bottom of what exactly made the Alters tick – though it is heavily hinted that their vibrant exterior hid, to an extent, a real darkness of character. The feeling we are left with is one of dissatisfaction, a mere scraping of the surface of their lives. The Alters are the real mystery here, and it’s not a mystery which is solved by this zippy, if somewhat disjointed documentary.

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