The Mastermind is a 2025 heist film written and directed by Kelly Reichardt. The film stars Josh O'Connor, Alana Haim, Hope Davis, John Magaro, Gaby Hoffmann and Bill Camp. Set in 1970, the film follows a struggling family man who secretly plots to steal art from a sleepy suburban museum while the nation rages over the Vietnam War. Reichardt described the film as a struggle between the allure of individualism and the necessity of collective action. The film was inspired by a mixture of real-life events and classic films, including the 1972 robbery of the Worcester Art Museum and the films of Jean-Pierre Melville.
The film had its world premiere at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival on May 23, where it competed for the Palme d'Or, and was released in the United States by Mubi on October 17.
Plot
In 1970, Framingham, Massachusetts, unemployed carpenter James Blaine "J.B." Mooney schemes to steal four Arthur Dove paintings from the local art museum. Despite already having borrowed money from his parents, he borrows money for his mother under the pretense of using it for work so he can pay three men to pull off the heist, though the getaway driver backs out after stealing a car for the job. J.B. drives the two thieves, Guy Hickey and Ronnie Gibson, to the museum, where they successfully steal the paintings while Gibson pulls a gun on a student doing a homework assignment and beats up a security guard.
J.B. proudly displays one of the stolen paintings in his living room, only to take it down when his father, a local judge, criticizes the thieves for their lack of ambition. He assembles a container for the paintings and hides them in the loft of a barn, returning home to find local police and the FBI questioning his family. They inform him that Gibson named him as the mastermind of the heist after being arrested while robbing a bank. J.B. denies his involvement and asks his furious wife Terri to take their sons Carl and Tommy to his parents' house, though Tommy refuses to go with her.
Guy calls J.B. to press him for more money. When J.B. takes Tommy along to meet him, the meeting is revealed to be a setup when an organized crime outfit abducts J.B. and forces him to take them to the paintings' location. As his role in the robbery is made public knowledge, J.B. goes into hiding with Fred and Maude, his friends from art school. While Fred is excited by J.B.'s story, Maude privately confronts him, having deduced that J.B.'s plan was to use their old professor, a Dove fan, as a fence to sell the paintings. She asks him to leave, and J.B. rejects Fred's suggestion to hide out at his brother's Torontocommune in favor of traveling to Cleveland to stay with other friends. Upon arrival, he learns that they left town the day before, and hitchhikes to Cincinnati.
After learning that the paintings were recovered and returned to the museum, J.B. calls Terri and attempts to rationalize his actions, but she hangs up when he asks for money. Unable to afford the bus fare to Toronto, he steals an elderly woman's pocketbook and escapes into a crowd of anti-Vietnam War protesters. The police violently break up the rally and arrest J.B. alongside several protesters, ignoring his objections as he is put in the back of a police van and driven away.
Cast
Josh O'Connor as James Blaine "J.B." Mooney, the titular mastermind
In September 2024, it was reported that Kelly Reichardt would write and direct the art heist film The Mastermind. Neil Kopp, Anish Savjani, and Vincent Savino would produce for Filmscience, with Mubi financing the film and distributing in North America. Josh O'Connor would star in the film.[4] In October 2024, Alana Haim and John Magaro joined the cast.[5][6] On November 13, 2024, it was reported that production had begun, with Hope Davis, Bill Camp, Gaby Hoffmann, Amanda Plummer, Eli Gelb, Cole Doman, Javion Allen, Matthew Maher, and Rhenzy Feliz having joined the cast.[7]
Inspirations
Reichardt had a long-running fascination with art thefts, and had been collecting newspaper clippings about heists for years. She remarked that in the 1970s, it was relatively easy to steal art, and that the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist happened because there were "acid heads running the security."[8] She was specifically inspired by the 1972 robbery of the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts, in which two Gauguins, a Picasso, and a Rembrandt were stolen.[9] She started working on the movie after reading about the 50th anniversary of the Worcester heist. She explained that "I'm just fascinated with people stealing art, and the idea of taking something from a public space to enjoy on your own, like the people that had the de Kooning in their bedroom. Instead of everyone enjoying this painting, it'll just be you behind your bedroom door."[10] Although many Reichardt films are shot in the Pacific Northwest, Reichardt set the film in Massachusetts because she went to art school in the state and felt that the script "makes sense [as] a Massachusetts story."[11]
The film's setting highlights the decline of 1960s counterculture. Reichardt said that she moved the date of the heist from 1972 to 1970 because the characters needed to be "figuring out what's next" as a country, because at the end of the 1960s, "[t]his whole freewheeling thing's not working out."[10] In addition, the film's narrative parallels "the unconventional narratives of [1970s] New Hollywood [cinema] that were populated by offbeat antiheroes."[12] Living in a comfortable suburb, and with no risk of being drafted,[13] J.B. has the luxury of not being "tuned in to the political climate," although reality remains "just on the edges of the frame."[11] She noted that J.B. was "rebelling against his middle-class life" without "a clear idea of the alternative would be," and "mindlessly[] ... take[s] advantage of his privilege whenever he is in trouble or whenever he needs to."[14]
J.B.'s unfocused rebellion ties into a common Reichardt theme, "the individual versus the person in a community."[13] Like Robert Bresson's Pickpocket (1959), the film is structured as an "exploration of a sinner, why he sins, and the consequences of those sins."[15] Reichardt said that the film was in part about the "cost" of "personal freedom," explaining that "being able to be the outlaw is a privilege" and that J.B. relies on the women in his life to "carr[y] the weight" of his antics.[16] She added that the film questions whether a person can "really remain separate from what's going on around [them]."[13]
J.B.'s choice of what art to steal reflects his own personal tastes, rather than profit maximization. O'Connor said that "there's a sort of ego there ... 'I'll steal the artists that only real artists know about.'"[17] In the film, J.B. steals four real Arthur Dove paintings: Tree Forms (1932), Willow Tree (1937), Tanks & Snowbanks (1938), and Yellow, Blue-Green and Brown (1941).[18][19][20][21][22] However, he passes up the chance to steal more famous paintings, some of which reside in Washington, D.C.'s National Gallery of Art, such as John Singer Sargent's Street in Venice, Mary Cassatt's Child in a Straw Hat, Frederic Edwin Church's Niagara, and Thomas Cole's The Voyage of Life: Youth.[9]Artnet explained that while Dove was "a respected artist whose works hang in some of America’s greatest museums ... the only way he would make headlines in the art press today is if someone staged a heist of his works."[18] Reichardt noted that even in the 1970s, Dove was not the most popular artist, and that she liked how J.B.'s focus on Dove "lowers the stakes" and was a better fit for "the size of my film" and "the ambitions of this character."[13]
Style
The film plays with genre expectations and has been described as an "anti-heist movie." Reichardt explained while she was heavily inspired by the heist films of Jean-Pierre Melville, she did not want to focus on the process of the heist as much as Melville would. She was more interested in the "unwinding" of J.B.'s plan than the plan itself, and said that "if you went to this film thinking it was a heist film, you might be pissed."[10] However, she noted that the heist film formula existed for a reason and that scripting a film to defy genre conventions required "a lot of trial and error."[14]
Reichardt scripted the character of J.B. like a Bresson actor, "a sort of blank character that you can project onto." She praised Josh O'Connor for "set[ting] aside ego" to play the part.[10]Manohla Dargis explained that "[o]ne of the trickier things about J.B. as a character is that he isn't obviously likable or dislikable, which makes it hard to get a handle on him."[23] Sarah Belmont agreed that "figuring out who [J.B.] is and what drives him[] becomes almost as important as knowing if he will get away with his master plan."[24]
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 92% of 112 critics' reviews are positive.The website's consensus reads: "Kelly Reichardt crafts a heist film at her own laconic pace with The Mastermind, a contemplative crime drama that glides along Josh O'Connor's effortless watchability and a sumptuously vintage aesthetic."[31]Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 80 out of 100, based on 35 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.[32][33] Tim Grierson of ScreenDaily considered that the protagonist's story "connects to something larger about an America losing its way".[12]Peter Bradshaw described The Mastermind as "quietly gripping" in his 4 out of 5 stars review of the film in The Guardian.[34]David Rooney[de] of The Hollywood Reporter pitched the film as "an artful exercise in genre reinvention".[35]
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