Visit the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and you will be confronted by 13 empty spaces on the walls, where great paintings are supposed to be.
The will of Mrs. Gardner, who died in 1924, stipulated that the arrangement of her personal collection in the museum she built could never change. Since the baker’s dozen of paintings -worth $300 million, supposedly, but really priceless – were stolen in 1990, the empty spaces on the walls must remain vacant, as though reminding all comers that the case is still open.
The case is taken up by filmmaker Rebecca Dreyfus in “Stolen,” an investigative documentary that tries to shed light on the maddening, stubborn mystery.
Dreyfus may have intended a more ordinary, descriptive film, but that went out the window when she hitched her wagon to a dapper, 75-year-old art crime detective named Harold Smith. Smith suggested the film could provide an impetus for further sleuthing, and he introduces Dreyfus to a half-dozen or so leads – some of them seemingly hot.
Smith thus becomes the on-camera center of things, and he’s a specimen. Elegantly dressed in bowler hat and eyepatch, Smith has lived for decades with disfiguring skin cancer, caused by an experimental skin treatment he tried while in the military in his 20s. (He died in 2005, after filming was completed.) To picture him, try imagining the elderly John Gielgud cast as a gentleman spy.
“Stolen” returns to the roots of the heist, which was easily managed in the wee hours of St. Patrick’s Day, 1990. Boston Herald reporter Tom Mashburg talks about his obsession with the case, which at one point had him agreeing to be blindfolded and led to a secret location where he saw what might have been a stolen Rembrandt.
Or possibly not. Every time a lead unfolds, the trail eventually goes dead. Which strongly suggests that a $5 million reward will bring out a lot of crackpots and a great many false leads. The voice-mails of people who contact Harold Smith suggest a dubious collection of conspiracy theorists and con artists.
Along with Smith’s quest, the film offers a sketchy history of the Gardner Museum, plus letters between Gardner and the great art expert Bernard Berenson, who selected and brokered her collection. The letters are read by Blythe Danner and Campbell Scott, and suggest the passion of people who are in the enviable and slightly unreal position of having nothing better to do than think about art.
Art scholars chime in, as does Tracy Chevalier, author of the novel (later movie) “The Girl in the Pearl Earring.” She sings the praises of a Vermeer painting, “The Concert,” which was the most valuable of the stolen items.
This is a cracking good story, although there are times you wish Dreyfus (working in tandem with mentor Albert Maysles, a legendary documentarian) would provide a clearer, deeper portrait of this world; abrupt shifts leave some subplots hanging, and the Gardner-Berenson connection needs more light.
When the trail leads to rumors of Irish gangsters and the Irish Republican Army, even a Scotland Yard man looks scared. The ending of this movie won’t tie up the loose ends, but there are only so many chances an enterprising filmmaker can be expected to take.
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