The Great Art Heist Caper-Carmen Diaz and Colin Firth’s “ Gambit” (2012)- A Film Review   

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

Gambit, starring Colin Firth, Cameron Diaz, Allan Rickman, 2012

Willie Sutton the great and legendary bank robber was reputed to have said (I assume when he was in police custody although who knows maybe he gave free-lance interviews on the fly) when asked why he robbed banks answered truly enough “that was where the money was.” Okay, but dear sweet Willie was an old-fashioned boy and while in his time that was the place to go to earn his daily living that mode of employment is now rather dangerous filled with sensors, wires and the 3^rd Marine Division, or so it seems. Moreover as the film under review The Gambit amply demonstrates there are more ways to heaven through guile, and through a choice piece in the international art market. That guile is important since there are basically two ways to acquire art and amass your fortune. That aforementioned guile which will drive the action in this film and a straight out heist into some museum overriding the security systems and such which is the stuff of more than one cinematic storyline. I like the second way quite a bit since I have been around long enough to have seen the masters of the profession at work in the famous, or infamous your choice, big rip-off at the Gardner Museum in Boston which to this day has the frames of the ripped off art work as painful reminders that those objects have never been recovered and the police and others are still scratching their heads on that one.

The guile strategy does have its good points though especially if you have a ready buyer and you have an enflamed unscrupulous individual wealthy, wealthy these days meaning a billionaire or one who has access to billions. Especially when it is an inside job, a comeuppance inside job. The average person probably does not know it since the very rich in Scotty Fitzgerald’s famous aphorism are different, very different from you and me but high end art collectors can put art experts on their payrolls without thinking about it. A wise investment when you think about it guarding against fakes and frauds and tax deductible too. That is the case here with hired gun art expert Deane, played by Colin Firth who is out to bamboozle an ugly rich and nude everyman billionaire do we really need to know names, played by the villainous late British actor Alan Rickman.

This is how this caper played out and you really have to admire it even if your heart is with those Gardner master thieves. Claude Monet, the max daddy Impressionist, painted a couple of haystacks out in the French countryside in the 1890s, one at dawn the other at dusk. The “at dawn” one money bags already has but the other “at dusk” had a long and troubled history including being part of German Nazi Goring’s private collection and supposedly  subsequently when the Reich fell down in poor Podunk, Texas in the hands of the guy who grabbed it when the Nazi went down. Or rather to complete the key ensemble, his granddaughter PJ now, played by Cameron Diaz, a true cowgirl in the sand.

Deane’s play is to convince the dear Lord that the Texas Monet is legitimate and enlists PJ in the caper to add the final touch to the also lecherous Lord. The caper goes through a bunch of perhaps unnecessary pratfalls once PJ hits London in order to get her claws into the Lord, get them in good so he buys the story, takes the bait. Which he does. This is the beauty of the play though. Deane had his confederate master art forger paint two Monets-dawn and dusk and through a series of flimflam maneuvers is able to substitute a fake “dawn” for the real one in the Lord’s possession while claiming the dusk one is a fake (which it is of course). Deane sells the real “dawn” to a Japanese competitor of the Lord’s for a cool ten million-pounds (pre-Brexit). Nice play-and PJ gets a big cut too before heading back to Podunk, Texas. I wonder if the dear Lord is interested in a Rembrandt self-portrait–cheap at the price.