Museum mystery comes to life

Stolen
Directed by: Rebecca Dreyfus
Narrated by: Blythe Danner, Campbell Scott
At: Kendall Square
Running time: 85 minutes
Unrated

''Stolen" is a spooky new documentary that you'll see for its central mystery (who stole those paintings from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum 16 years ago?), but you'll stay for the ghost story. It's all-consuming. Once in a while the camera gazes up at the wall and lingers on one of the vacant frames that continues to hang half in tribute, half in the hope that its missing contents will be returned. They're the most tragic of chalk outlines. Only a Samaritan or a clever inspector can help wash them away.

In an attempt to help crack the case, the director of ''Stolen," Rebecca Dreyfus, puts in a call to Harold Smith, a lanky 75-year-old fine-art detective. Smith favors gray suits and a black bowler hat. His skin is scarred, seemingly held in place by an eye patch and a discreet prosthetic nose. Smith has been scouring the planet for missing valuables for half a century, and the case of the Gardner museum is particularly vexing for him, as it is full of bogus leads and egregious dead ends.

The basic facts of the heist, as widely reported and pondered over in the local news, are these. During the wee hours of March 18, 1990, two men pretending to be Boston police officers made their way into the Gardner, tied up the security guards, and made off with 13 paintings, among them a Manet, three Rembrandts, five Degas, and one Vermeer. The burglary caught the museum with its guard complacently down, and the film offers some explanation as to why.

The crime's worst news is the nabbing of Vermeer's ''The Concert." Experts on the Dutch master are consulted, including the professor Celeste Brusati; Tracy Chevalier, the author of the Vermeer novel ''Girl With a Pearl Earring"; and Susan Vreeland, who wrote ''Girl in Hyacinth Blue," a fine speculative historical novel that traced the path of a fictitious Vermeer painting across time.

According to a swift and exhaustive profile Dan Kennedy wrote for the Boston Phoenix in 1997, the biggest loss was Rembrandt's ''The Storm in the Sea of Galilee," the painter's lone seascape. Dreyfus's decision to stress the significance of the Vermeer is, in part, a nod to Vermeer's return to the limelight. And as someone notes, there are now only 34 others that a museumgoer can see. But the painting also corresponds with the conspiracies that emerge from Smith's detective work.

Within 10 minutes, Dreyfus gets her shrewd structural oscillation underway. The scholars eulogize the missing Vermeer. Cops and journalists (among them former Globe reporter Tom Mashberg, who covered the story for the Herald) speculate about the still-unsolved case. Smith hops back and forth across the Atlantic. And the story of Isabella Stewart Gardner is detailed. The chief device used to exemplify Gardner's determination are the letters she wrote to Bernard Berenson, the Lithuanian-born, Boston-raised, and Harvard-educated collector who helped her amass her treasures. (Blythe Danner and Campbell Scott read the exchanges.) A few letters in, we realize that Gardner herself was not above smuggling, urging Berenson to sneak a Giorgione with him from Italy.

The film dips in and out of those story lines (Gardner's life, the whereabouts of the painting, the encomiums for Vermeer), producing unexpected dimensions of tonal, emotional, and psychological depth. Time seems to have collapsed, and real characters develop, especially as Smith talks to suspects such as the creepy antiques dealer and ex-con William Youngworth and a reformed art crook from England nicknamed Turbo.

Some will be shocked to learn that Whitey Bulger might have had something to do with the theft. Some won't at all. Either way, the conspiracies mount. So does the sense that something otherworldly is afoot. One of the museum's attendants recalls a childhood encounter with the formidable John Singer Sargent portrait of Gardner. She had lost her son, and the attendant was an orphan. And he swears that the Gardner spoke to him, the motherless child. You may not believe in spooks, but there's scarcely a reason not to believe him.

In fact, the Poe-like atmosphere in ''Stolen" is such a chilling success that when Mashberg says that Gardner would have cracked this case herself, it's impossible to imagine that she isn't out looking for those paintings right now.

Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com.