In The Mastermind, an art heist’s aftermath unfolds against the backdrop of Vietnam War-era America

The brand new movie The Mastermind opens with J.B. Mooney (Josh O’Connor) in a gallery, going through the digital camera, shoulders hunched and head cocked, presumably assessing a portray—maybe for its inventive benefit, however definitely for its financial worth, since he’s casing the museum for a heist.

Author-director Kelly Reichardt’s earlier movie Exhibiting Up (2022), starring Michelle Williams as an art-college administrator and ceramicist, surveyed a working life to see the place artwork may slot in. Her new function, which simply had its world premiere on the Cannes Movie Pageant, ponders the non secular and materials price of artwork within the wider context of Vietnam Battle–period America.

J.B. is a carpenter; perhaps with assist from his mother and father, he makes sufficient to maintain his household, spouse Terri (Alana Haim) and sons (Jasper and Sterling Thompson) in a vinyl-sided suburban ranch residence. However he’s scuffling alongside, with no ambitions to his personal contracting enterprise, he says—he doesn’t wish to be the boss, on the telephone all day. He needs one thing faster, which he finds because the boss—the mastermind, per the movie’s ironic title—of a smash-and-grab he maps out for a few fuck-up buddies to hold out with L’eggs nylons over their heads.

We will inform that J.B. has inventive expertise from the drawings he makes from reminiscence of the theft’s goal: 4 Arthur Dove work, Willow Tree (1937), Yellow Blue Inexperienced Brown (1941), Tree Kinds (1932) and Tanks & Snowbanks (1938), from the fictional Framingham Artwork Museum. Reichardt imagines the museum with delicate, granular element, evoking the aspirational, dutiful utility of the municipal museum to mid-century civic tradition: dozy guards preserve detached watch over minor works from main actions, scrutinised or handed over by an viewers of youngsters with college assignments, stressed youngsters dragged alongside by their mother and father, formally dressed retirees. When the heist happens, early within the movie, it prompts J.B.’s mother and father (Hope Davis and Invoice Camp) to muse that they need to actually make the most of their membership extra usually.

For the job, carried off with out the friction of safety cameras or high-tech alarm programs, Reichardt took inspiration from an identical theft, in 1972, of the Worcester Artwork Museum, when two Gauguins, a Picasso and a piece from Rembrandt’s workshop have been taken throughout common museum hours. (The work have been shortly recovered and the thieves apprehended.)

Although The Mastermind is ready in Massachusetts, the manufacturing crew constructed the museum inside in a warehouse, and used for an exterior I.M. Pei’s 1969 Cleo Rogers Memorial Library within the American modernist mecca of Columbus, Indiana. The redbrick execution of an Worldwide Fashion design is suggestive of most of the museums that sprung up in mid-sized American cities with an emergent donor class in the course of the period by which the movie takes place. (As a Mainer, I considered the Portland Museum of Artwork’s Charles Shipman Payson Constructing, designed by Pei’s companion Henry N. Cobb.) The setting is believably Massachusetts—the autumn leaves, early-Nineteen Seventies setting and cameo from the Irish mob all recall the Boston crime traditional The Mates of Eddie Coyle (1973), although Rob Mazurek’s refined free-jazz rating is an enchancment on Dave Grusin’s clean jazz for the sooner movie.

Reichardt’s ecoterrorism thriller Evening Strikes (2013) was nearer to Eddie Coyle in its tense diagramming of distrust and betrayal inside a crew finishing up illicit exercise. The Mastermind is extra calmly comedian, displaying the thieves working amateurishly round snags they need to have anticipated. J.B.’s plans go mistaken partly as a result of he depends on the identical gendered division of labour that governs his household life—his frozen-out spouse sews the fabric he makes use of to guard the stolen work however can’t watch the youngsters on the day of the heist. When he inevitably begins to really feel the warmth from regulation enforcement and leaves city, he may very well be one other wayward husband stepping out for cigarettes and getting misplaced on the open street—or one other Reichardt protagonist, Michelle Williams in Wendy and Lucy (2008), likewise a dropout dwelling hand-to-mouth, with few convictions besides the necessity for money.

One of the dependable pleasures of Reichardt’s movies is the way in which she and her common cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt reference the work of Nineteen Seventies photographers like Stephen Shore and William Eggleston, providing up muted tableaux of the post-industrial US to replace the visible grammar of the American West and its myths of freedom. That’s very true of The Mastermind, set contemporaneously with Shore and Eggleston’s work and full of gas-guzzling station wagons and the period-appropriate hollowed-out downtowns of its areas in Ohio and simply throughout the river in Kentucky.

From the opening scene, when J.B. palms a Revolutionary Battle carving from its case within the museum, beneath the watchful eye of a flag with 13 stars, the movie evokes its interval with contrasting imagery of patriotism and protest. The Vietnam Battle hums alongside within the background of the movie, within the type of marches, longhair-vs.-hardhat confrontations, black-and-white warfare footage on tv and a sailor in gown blues on the Greyhound. On the run, staying in a farmhouse with outdated hippie associates and considering going over the border like a draft dodger, J.B. is caught uneasily between the straight phrase and the counterculture, like a personality within the tales Ann Beattie would start publishing a number of years later. Each artwork lover and artwork thief, aspiring collector and aspiring black-marketeer, Reichardt’s protagonist is a proxy for the divided soul of a nation.

Watch a clip from The Mastermind:

The Mastermind had its premiere on the Cannes Movie Pageant on 23 Might