Critic's Notebook

Tribeca Festival

Stage magicians and practitioners of close magic, giving you the patter while palming your watch and dropping a goldfish in your martini, are engaged in a deception business with roots going back a very long time. So when that trade is targeted for some up-to-date cyber crime from a different cohort of tricksters, there’s a clash of new magic and old underway. Or there might be if, as far as the magicians are concerned, the pirates had any honor; but they don’t. All that’s happening is straight-up theft of someone else’s original material and consequent loss of income, which tips the heirs to the ancient trickster gods into the same enfeebling online grinder machine as the rest of us.

Matthew Testa’s documentary “Stealing Magic” follows British magician Andi Gladwin on the trial of an anonymous online vendor: someone, somewhere, calling themselves “Erdnase,” is acquiring and reselling the self-published books and background materials by which magicians adopt new routines, spread knowledge and record their trade’s history. These small-press niche items are valued commodities and rich with institutional knowledge, while of perhaps debatable interest to a general public; but like several other magicians speaking in the film, Mr. Gladwin is fired up with righteous indignation. He hasn’t even been tricked as such, just completely undercut and disrespected by someone buying copies of his work and then selling it on for a pittance, with the added hint of revealing the not-all-that-hidden mysteries of The Magic Castle crowd to the uninitiated. It never is clear exactly what the thief gets out of it; but the hit to Mr. Gladwin’s business is real enough. He first contacts the anonymous vendor, appealing to that person’s sense of right and wrong. “Pay me $25,000 every month in Bitcoin,” comes the predictable reply, as modern as it gets.

Mr. Gladwin hires a London private investigator and alongside him follows the trail to Serbia. They locate a middleman in a rough neighborhood; despite bringing along their own 7-foot Serbian muscle, they are compelled to beat a retreat. Mr. Gladwin puts G.P.S. trackers in his mail packages and pursues them to Paris, then on to the Czech Republic, where he stakes out shipping containers and enlists a Prague magician to try and squeeze info out of a legitimate commercial import-export company. Mr. Gladwin might be skirting the edges of international law. Then his Sacramento business happens to catch fire and burn down, after which the premises of another magician he spoke to also burns down, neither event seeming very magical. Mr. Gladwin plows ahead.

In the documentary these adventures are backed by an upbeat jazz-funk soundtrack, giving the enterprise the air of a caper film. By the time the Gladwin team rocks up in Las Vegas it’s possible they or Mr. Testa are envisaging Danny Ocean’s crew, rebalancing the scales of justice right where the cards are most marked and the dice most loaded. Two genial professional hackers are hired in Vegas and let loose on the available data. Although the timescale isn’t clear (nor the price tag), the hackers make rapid progress and crack the case. A viewer wonders whether Mr. Gladwin might have opted for this approach from the off; but that would have forestalled international travel and any invocation of the movie gods. It would have precluded doing things the hands-on traditional way with a hint of the dramatic, and demystified the operation to the point of banality. Where’s the magic in that?