The art of the steal: Kelly Reichardt on The Mastermind

On 17 May 1972, two masked men walked into the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts and came out, rather clumsily, with four paintings – a Rembrandt, two Gauguins and a Picasso. In broad daylight, they had taken them from the walls, passed through a gaggle of high-school girls, shot a security guard at the exit and thrown the artworks into the back of a station wagon. About a month later, they were caught after some of the plot’s co-conspirators were overheard yapping about the crime at a bar. It may have been one of the first armed museum robberies in American history, but slick and ingenious it was not – an underwhelming reality that helped inspire Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind. Rather than inflate and spectacularise the legend of this particular heist, however, Reichardt used it merely as a point of departure and seems to have deliberately lowered the stakes. “Those thieves stole masterworks. Our guys steal Arthur Dove paintings,” Reichardt says with a grin, referring to the lesser-known American abstract painter.

Indeed, the scale and approach of The Mastermind, which premiered in Competition at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, seem to actively go against the conventions of the Hollywood heist film, in which, Reichardt suggests, “everything is linked together like a fun puzzle with a big payoff”. Set in 1970, when the protest movements of the previous decade were still boiling over, the film focuses on an unemployed family man, J.B. Mooney (Josh O’Connor), the ‘mastermind’ behind an art heist modelled loosely on the ‘72 robbery. But unlike the crime capers popularised in the 70s – such as Sam Peckinpah’s The Getaway (1972) or Sidney Lumet’s The Anderson Tapes (1971) – Reichardt’s heist takes place in the first act, allowing the narrative to unspool in unpredictable ways instead of building up to a standard climax. “When genre falls apart, you get pieces of something that demands a different kind of writing, filmmaking and thinking,” says Reichardt, who credits her 30 years of teaching college film classes with her natural impulse to unpack and break cinematic blueprints down. The Mastermind is “more of a coming-undone film than a heist film or even an anti-heist film”, in that it focuses on the event’s aftermath, with Mooney’s protracted downfall playing out like one long, piteous hangover.

Fresh from his roguish roles in Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera (2023) and Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers (2024), Josh O’Connor feels well-suited to playing a thief. At times he evokes Elliott Gould’s deadpan detective in Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973), masking melancholy behind his shaggy swagger, yet O’Connor’s Mooney is also intriguingly indecipherable. “[Josh] has great range, but I wanted Mooney to be someone you can project on to; who has a certain blankness to him, which is not something everyone’s ego would want them to do,” Reichardt says. She had long been impressed by O’Connor and his physically expressive performance style, ever since watching him in Francis Lee’s God’s Own Country (2017), and he was the first actor she approached to play the part. With his signature smirk, O’Connor gives his delusional deadbeat a certain charm. Mooney is the failson of a county judge who takes yet another loan from his socialite mother to finance his clandestine operation, claiming it’s a business investment – though we can’t entirely tell whether he’s being knowingly deceptive or genuinely believes his own lies.

One thing’s for sure: his wife Terri (Alana Haim) sees through his bullshit. “Alana just has such a great mug,” Reichardt says. “It just makes me want to film it.” Delivering a largely silent performance, Haim’s Terri is all dagger eyes and pent-up resentment; disappointment being too grand a feeling for a woman who expects less than the bare minimum from her slacker spouse. Nowadays, it feels like there are fewer interesting faces in the movies than there used to be. O’Connor and Haim are delightful exceptions to this, and they inhabit the era convincingly in their Harrington jackets, corduroy skirts and washed-out autumnal threads.

The Mastermind is one of Reichardt’s largest productions to date, allowing her to mount a series of careful period recreations. Though set in Massachusetts, the film was shot primarily in and around Cincinnati, Ohio, which “has so many little pockets that [evoke] the 70s” – the drive-throughs, strip malls, gas stations and school buildings that make up Mooney’s stomping grounds. A library designed by the renowned Chinese American architect I.M. Pei was used for the exterior of the museum that Mooney and his lackeys plunder, although that building is actually in Columbus, Indiana – an unexpected haven for modernist architecture showcased in Kogonada’s Columbus (2017).

The roundabout outside the museum served as a conceptual starting point for Reichardt, who was tickled to learn that galleries have since phased them out to limit the number of potential escape routes. “This was an era when snatch-and-grab thefts at museums became a thing, and people realised that security had to be taken seriously, and roundabouts were not such a great idea,” she says, laughing.

Reichardt has allowed humour to take a more prominent place in her work in recent years – think of the understated absurdity of Showing Up (2022), in which Michelle Williams’ artist struggles to finish her sculptures in time for a gallery show while tending to an ailing pigeon. The Mastermind continues this trend, using children – Mooney’s two sons and some teenage museumgoers – to diminish the heist and frame it as the bumbling actions of loser adults. When the thieves make their way to the getaway car, they’re forced to manually rotate a lever in order to open the boot. Reichardt’s cinema has typically employed long takes to create an intimate, stretched-out sense of time; here, duration is a gag meant to underscore the robbers’ incompetence.

Urbane jazz scores often propel crime thrillers, creating momentum and a sense of unpredictability. But Reichardt’s films typically go light on the music, which makes the distinctive free-jazz rhythms of The Mastermind something of a novelty. She turned to Rob Mazurek of the avant-garde ensemble the Chicago Underground to write the film’s minimalist jazz score, but working with such an experimental artist demanded a different sort of process. “Every time I updated my edit,” Reichardt says, “I’d send him the new cut and he’d send me little pieces of music and cues back, so it was a matter of him adjusting the sounds according to the tempos of the edit.” Because the film relies on musical cues to structure its sense of time and transitions, she also had to work closely with music editor Gisburg Smialek: “It reminded me at times of making films with foreign languages I don’t understand – I’d start editing a scene with dialogue only to realise I don’t understand anything. So it was helpful to have [Smialek] translate the music, and tell me, for instance, that we can add a horn here to make the flow of it all feel shorter.” Mazurek’s score mirrors Mooney’s unravelling, simultaneously capturing his façade of confidence and punching up the anxiety with its percussive trills and cheeky brass timbres.

In one of the biggest film set constructions she has yet supervised, Reichardt and her team built the museum interior and commissioned replicas of the works inside. She chose Arthur Dove paintings in part because of convenience; she knows someone at the Phillips Collection in Washington DC, which is home to the largest Dove collection in the world. “Dove was on the out in terms of popularity by the 70s, and I was worried that a single painting of his would seem underwhelming,” Reichardt explains. “But then we found he did have a single show [in 1970], which we were able to get a picture of that we riffed off.” Putting multiple Doves in a single space, Reichardt says, allowed her to bring out their beauty. Dove is considered America’s first abstract painter, and his nonrepresentational visions of nature “didn’t really fit into the movements around him”, which is why he created “other worlds for himself”. This striving for an alternative is echoed, somewhat wryly, in Mooney’s foolhardy attempt to create his own wealth. His grand scheme is a rejection of his lame suburban existence; an assertion of his audacity and cunning. This attempt at self-definition, however, proves pointless when the cops identify him as the culprit, forcing him to abandon his home and go on the run.

Reichardt was born in 1964 and grew up in the suburbs of Miami, Florida. Her parents were cops, though she says she never consciously draws inspiration from her origins. “I have a bad memory and I’m not into making nostalgic films. Though it’s not like I loved growing up where I did,” says Reichardt, who moved to Boston soon after graduating high school. (She currently lives between the Pacific Northwest and New York, where she teaches at a university.) “I do remember that my first political memory was getting out of the pool – I was very young – and having to watch Nixon resign on TV,” she says. For The Mastermind, she actively avoided romanticising the decade and instead sought to create a mood that felt “lived in and in the moment”. Looking back on those times can feel a bit disorienting, she explains: “Obviously some things back then were better, some were worse, but it’s possible that that was also the most liberal time in our country. I mean, Nixon almost seems like a liberal compared to what we live in now. But my intention was to capture the rush of that time; this sense that a moment has come and will pass.”

Throughout the film, we’re subtly – and, eventually, not so subtly – made aware of the Vietnam War protests raging around the country. Signs of this unrest seep into Mooney’s isolated reality in the form of radio and television broadcasts, and serve to complicate our relationship to him. Do we sympathise with his plight? Or are we turned off by his self-absorption? If O’Connor’s natural charisma makes us want to root for the rogue, the rest of the film stands at a more critical distance. This is a man incapable of viewing himself in relation to others – to the family he fails properly to consider when he concocts the heist; as well as to the social movements he disregards as soon as they come into his orbit. Reichardt combed dozens of hours of archival footage from the 70s – student uprisings, reports from war zones, press conferences – to assemble the images and recordings that pop up around Mooney while he’s driving or watching TV with the boys. “I worked really hard to keep the subtext at the edge of the frame. Mooney is in a bubble, and though what’s happening around the world and in the country is outside his conscious thinking, I wanted it to always be knocking on his glass container.”

As Reichardt’s previous tales of American life on the fringes have shown, even the most marginalised people are prone to being swept up and/or stunted by greater political forces – like the 19th-century frontiersmen of First Cow (2020), whose modest biscuit-making business is crushed by the capitalist machinery of western expansion; or the radical environmentalists of Night Moves (2013), whose violent political interventions only seem to lay bare the futility of individual protest in the face of corporate power and government surveillance. Mooney’s tragedy blooms into something much more solemn and melancholic in his itinerant final act, in which he seeks safe haven and sustenance from distant friends, and broods in anonymous hotel rooms across the Midwest. His old friend Fred (John Magaro) suggests he join a commune in Canada but Fred’s wife Maude (Gaby Hoffmann) has no sympathy at all. Mooney insists he’s no hippie, again reaffirming his determined individualism. Here, Mooney isn’t the victim of nefarious power structures so much as he’s sabotaged by his own refusal to see himself as part of a broader social fabric. In other words, The Mastermind is about the folly of ‘main character syndrome’. Though the traditional heist movie, with its Robin Hoods and do-or-die consequences, might tell us otherwise, Reichardt’s spin on the genre says history is happening to everyone, in multiple ways, and all at the same time. To ignore this will result in your downfall.

“A film is basically time and space,” Reichardt says. “So when you have a genre that has certain expectations about building tension and constantly escalating what’s going on in a certain time frame – well, I was interested in what happens when you take that structure away, which creates a less-directed way of looking.” I had asked Reichardt about a remarkable scene about midway through the film that simultaneously baffled, mesmerised and amused me: as Mooney hides the stolen paintings in a remote barn, the camera stays with him as, one by one, he lugs the canvases up a ladder and into a hayloft. How often do we see heist heroes performing these sorts of laborious tasks? Reichardt’s manipulation of time here shows how criminal subject matter is not inherently thrilling but sculpted to seem that way by the primarily “male footprints” of the traditional film canon. One might say this approach is quintessentially Reichardtian following her subversions of other genres, such as the Oregon Trail-set western Meek’s Cutoff (2010), which emphasises the monotony of frontier life.

“I sort of gag when people talk up the virtues of feminist filmmakers. I don’t like that designation,” Reichardt says. “At the same time, I do think there’s a bravado that comes with certain hierarchies of power that I’m inclined to deconstruct. I’m not ever aiming to tear down [the patriarchy] or these big male genres, but I am drawn to different consolidations of time; to other ways of thinking.”