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 advantage, however actually for its financial worth, since he’s casing the museum for a heist.

Author-director Kelly Reichardt’s earlier movie Displaying Up (2022), starring Michelle Williams as an art-college administrator and ceramicist, surveyed a working life to see the place artwork would possibly slot in. Her new characteristic, which simply had its world premiere on the Cannes Movie Competition, ponders the religious and materials value of artwork within the wider context of Vietnam Conflict–period America.

J.B. is a carpenter; possibly 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 house. However he’s scuffling alongside, with no ambitions to his personal contracting enterprise, he says—he doesn’t need to be the boss, on the cellphone 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 are able to 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 Types (1932) and Tanks & Snowbanks (1938), from the fictional Framingham Artwork Museum. Reichardt imagines the museum with refined, granular element, evoking the aspirational, dutiful utility of the municipal museum to mid-century civic tradition: dozy guards hold detached watch over minor works from main actions, scrutinised or handed over by an viewers of youngsters with faculty assignments, stressed children 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 reap the benefits of their membership extra typically.

For the job, carried off with out the friction of safety cameras or high-tech alarm techniques, 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 staff 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 Type design is suggestive of most of the museums that sprung up in mid-sized American cities with an emergent donor class throughout the period during 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-Seventies setting and cameo from the Irish mob all recall the Boston crime basic The Pals of Eddie Coyle (1973), although Rob Mazurek’s refined free-jazz rating is an enchancment on Dave Grusin’s easy 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, exhibiting the thieves working amateurishly round snags they need to have anticipated. J.B.’s plans go unsuitable 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 material he makes use of to guard the stolen work however can’t watch the children on the day of the heist. When he inevitably begins to really feel the warmth from legislation 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 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 crammed with gas-guzzling station wagons and the period-appropriate hollowed-out downtowns of its places in Ohio and simply throughout the river in Kentucky.

From the opening scene, when J.B. palms a Revolutionary Conflict carving from its case within the museum, below the watchful eye of a flag with 13 stars, the movie evokes its interval with contrasting imagery of patriotism and protest. The Vietnam Conflict 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 previous 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 just a few 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 Competition on 23 Might