When you consider it, it’s wild which you can simply stand toes from a van Gogh on the Museum of Trendy Artwork with nothing however a wire, a guard, and the social contract protecting you from doing something rash. The danger of leaving artworks so uncovered is the tradeoff of letting everybody admire them, fairly than placing them in a vault or a rich particular person’s compound. That stress is on the coronary heart of Kelly Reichardt’s new extremely idiosyncratic artwork heist movie The Mastermind (2025), quickly screening as a part of this yr’s New York Movie Competition earlier than opening in theaters on October 17.
The factor about artwork theft is that, contra its horny, intrigue-heavy portrayal in movies like The Thomas Crown Affair or Entrapment (each 1999), it truly tends to not be that difficult. Plenty of the time, you’ll be able to simply yoink a portray off the wall and run. (My editor suggested me to emphasize that that is under no circumstances a suggestion.) In 1972, some guys held up the Worcester Artwork Museum and made off with a Picasso, two Gauguins, and a bit from Rembrandt’s studio. The head of such crimes is, after all, the 1990 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist, which two dudes pulled off not by dodging laser alarms or cracking advanced locks, however merely tricking the guards by posing as cops. The custom continues to at the present time; Reichardt teaches at Bard, and simply final yr, a biology pupil there tried to make off with two work earlier than being hunted down with a police drone. (He was banned from campus however “allowed to complete his coursework remotely.”)
These sorts of blue-collar artwork thefts had been Reichardt’s inspiration for the plot of the movie. When JB (Josh O’Connor, taking part in an artwork prison for the second time in as a few years) and a few compatriots resolve to rob their native museum, they don’t plot something terribly elaborate — they’ll nab just a few Arthur Dove work, run previous the always-asleep guard, and drive off in a ready stolen automotive. But even this easy crime within the sleepy Massachusetts city of Framingham within the early Seventies runs into unexpected snags and penalties. Reichardt has described The Mastermind as “an aftermath movie, an unraveling movie,” and the way in which JB spirals — embarking on one of many extra pathetic fugitive runs I’ve ever seen within the heist style — makes the title more and more ironic.
Reichardt is without doubt one of the cannier cinematic chroniclers of United States historical past, with every of her interval items not directly undermining myths, just like the masculine frontiersman in Meek’s Cutoff (2011) or First Cow (2019). The Mastermind shouldn’t be located within the ’70s as mere affectation. This was simply after the golden age of municipal establishments amid postwar financial prosperity. Innumerable smaller cities and cities obtained lovely new libraries, metropolis halls, and museums. In actual life, Framingham didn’t but have an artwork museum on the time, so the manufacturing used an ideal instance of such structure — the I. M. Pei-designed Cleo Rogers Memorial Library in Columbus, Indiana, with its lovely brickwork — as its exterior stand-in.
The selection of artwork to focus on — Dove’s “Tree Types” (1932), “Willow Tree” (1937), “Tanks & Snowbanks” (1938), and “Yellow Blue Inexperienced Brown” (1941) — can also be deliberate. Dove was a modernist and is typically known as the primary American summary painter. When information of the heist breaks, JB’s father expresses befuddlement in any respect the fuss, as a result of he can’t see why anybody cared about these drawings within the first place. That’s a signpost of the conservative flip of the period, and the film solely deepens in post-’60s malaise because it goes.
Reichardt typically follows protagonists unmoored from society, whether or not they’re the settlers of Meek’s Cutoff and First Cow or the drifter in Wendy and Lucy (2008). In The Mastermind, JB turns into misplaced in one thing a lot scarier than the wilderness: Nixon’s America. Conversations with different characters reveal that he’s a former artwork pupil dissatisfied along with his on a regular basis suburban existence, the form of stultifying middle-class way of life constructed for thousands and thousands after World Battle II. But it surely turns on the market are worse issues than a spiritually empty household life. Amid crackdowns on antiwar protests, and buddies and comrades who both haven’t any time for him or promote him out in a heartbeat, JB learns the exhausting means that, with the spirit of the ’60s effectively and actually lifeless, the institution ethos that’s changed it’s much more hostile and alienating.
The Mastermind, directed by Kelly Reichardt, shall be exhibiting within the New York Movie Competition from September 27 to October 23, and the movie opens in theaters on October 17.
