What turned me onto this movie was the subject matter - the description read like one of my favorite movies, A Thomas Crown Affair, come to life. In the wee hours of St. Patrick's Day 1990, thieves disguised as police offers entered Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, tied up and gagged security guards and stole 13 priceless masterpieces. Let me stop for a moment and point out the security guards' fatal flaw that allowed this to happen. As someone who's lived in Boston, never in a million years would a Boston cop go to an art gallery on St. Patty's Day morning, I don't care if it was on fire. Seriously - they're either policing the parade, in the parade, or throwing beer cans AT the parade. What the hell were the guards thinking!? But I digress.
Considered one, if not the, greatest art heists in U.S. history, the works stolen included one of only 35 Vermeers in the world and several Rembrandts. To this day, none of the paintings have been recovered. The documentary Stolen traces the acquisition of the collection by Mrs. Gardner, their theft and famous art detective Harold Smith's international search for the truth. Now how couldn't you be tantalized by a description like that.
Well, much like communism, it sounds good on paper but doesn't quite translate to real life. Stolen, as we come to find out early in the film, is no Thomas Crown Affair. Stripped of its movie magic, the story has no witty banter, no excitingly well-timed art thefts played out for our enjoyment and the characters are far cries from Pierce Brosnan and Renee Russo. Instead, the leggy blond heroine is replaced by an eye-patch wearing, 75 year-old suit and bowler hat clad art detective. Any sexual tension between him and Pierce Brosnan would just be awkward at best. In reality, the international search for these paintings is quite boring - lots of backroom meetings and interviews with swarmy older men. There's a lot of talk about connections to the mafia and the IRA, but it's all just talk and gossip in an attempt to create action where none truly exists.
This is hardly the documentary's major weakness, however. The real problems come in the amateur documentary film-maker level editing and directing. The movie is disjointed, hard to follow and doesn't go into any significant depth into a subject - it's very surface level. While the search for the paintings leads from dead end to another, so too does the movie. Storylines just sort of fall off or stand alone with no fluidity from one to the next. The director chooses the route of having no narrator, which isn't always necessary but if you're not going to use one you've got to take the effort to tie things together yourself for the audience. This is just lazy Busch league amateur hour stuff.
Stolen is uninspiring and lacks any sort of passion, which is sad because the people affected by the robbery are quite passionate about it. The interesting cast of characters grieve over the loss and their love of art is admirable, but is totally not translated into the documentary which makes it that much more frustrating.
In an act of defiance, the Gardner Museum hung up the paintings' empty, original frames just as they were when the collection was in tact. To this day the empty frames poetically remain on the walls, like gaping wounds in the Museum's heart. I immediately took to this notion and let my life imitate art. For hours after the movie finished, I left my t.v. on with nothing but a black screen. It was my act of defiance, displaying for the world the gaping wounds left on my movie loving heart after watching such a terrible documentary. If you're as interested in this subject as I am, I recommend passing on this movie and picking up a book about it - I guarantee you'll learn more, it'll make more sense and be more interesting. Consider TMMC your neighborhood crime watch, like an old lady sitting on her porch with her binoculars. Let me help protect you from being robbed of your life too and when considering watching Stolen, WAIT FOR VHS!
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