In ‘The Mastermind,’ Josh O’Connor Fumbles the Art Heist, and the American Dream

Art heists are the rare birds of the underworld. Transgressive in their pursuit of beauty, intricate and difficult no matter the setting, they shock and inspire whenever they’re pulled off. Which is almost never, because, as every decent thief knows, they are almost impossible to profit from. The best fence in the world couldn’t cover up the origins of a masterpiece that’s a true one-of-one, so anyone who buys it would instantly become an accomplice to the crime. 

Kelly Reichardt knew all of this before she began making The Mastermind, her 10th feature film, which premiered in Cannes last week. The same cannot be said for her protagonist, J.B. Mooney (a rakish Josh O’Connor), the brains behind a half-planned theft from the fictional Framington Museum of Art, he far from lives up to the film’s (and this magazine’s) lofty title.

Set in small-town Massachusetts at the height of the Vietnam War, Mooney’s life at first appears eminently ordinary, with two cars in the driveway and a quietly amiable wife (Alana Haim) in the kitchen. His parents are part of Framington’s high society, and he likes to borrow their museum membership and go with his twin sons. But Mooney is covertly casing the joint; in the first scene he slips a toy soldier from a vitrine into his sunglasses case. His real goal, as he soon reveals to some seedier friends, is four small abstract landscapes by the painter Arthur Dove, which hang in the back corner of the museum’s second floor. He won’t rob them himself, but he’ll organize the getaway and provide sacks for the loot—oversized pillowcases sewn by his wife. He even borrows money from his prim mother (Hope Davis) to sweeten the deal.

If this sounds like the setup to a shadowy caper, think again. Reichardt has a history of using genre against itself, and her first act, though suspenseful, deflates its antihero. Though Rob Mazurek’s jazzy score pays homage to crime classics by Jean-Pierre Melville, O’Connor’s character is too distracted to get in the groove, and the drums more often skitter than snap. He commands little authority in the spheres of childcare or crime, and finds himself juggling both on the day of the heist. There’s a brilliant moment of comedy in Reichhardt’s otherwise understated script when Mooney tells a lackey “I said no guns!” in the same wheedling tone he uses on his kids for eating junk food.

Despite hiccups, his henchmen make off with the works, which Mooney stashes in a hayloft outside of town. But things quickly go south, and he is soon being pursued by federal agents and criminals alike, who are interested in the reward money for the paintings’ return. Reichardt’s script was inspired by a 1972 museum heist in Worcester, Massachusetts, which was carried out with a similar level of ineptitude; in that case, the stolen paintings were back in town custody within four weeks. In The Mastermind, it all happens within the film’s first hour.

What viewers are left with are Mooney’s efforts to disappear, which become a matter of almost existential interest to Reichardt. Abandoning wife and kids with scarcely a word of goodbye, he hides out first with some old friends from art school (a sublimely matched Gaby Hoffmann and John Magaro). “You’ve finally done it,” Magaro’s Fred chides him, almost in awe, “No more chipping away at the edges. You’ve blown up your life.” Indeed, as the film spins farther out from the crime, it seems more and more like a deliberate act of self-destruction. Though Mooney appears to possess everything a middle-class American male needs to thrive, he acts like a man who has nothing to lose.

Reichardt said during a Cannes Film Festival press conference that she likes to leave “a lot of room to project onto the character,” and her oblique methods, which may frustrate viewers used to more conventional plots, serve to invite speculation. The reason why Mooney carries out his foolhardy scheme is never explicitly stated, but the film draws parallels between his antisocial behavior and the “dereliction of duty” seen in American draft-dodgers of the day. Reichardt has expressed an interest in “the question of the individual versus who you are in a society, and can you keep those things apart?” Mooney, for one, seems determined to. Offered a clean getaway by Fred to a Canadian farmstead full of “draft-dodgers, radical feminists, dope fiends—good people,” he balks. O’Connor’s character can’t seem to take part in any society, be it a utopian commune or the workaday world. 

What captivates him instead is success on his own terms, which he grafts into the implausible shape of his heist. The most intriguing theory for me, suggested in the film by Fred’s disapproving wife, is that Mooney’s scheme was an attempt to make good on art-school yearnings and, specifically, impress an old professor who had a poster of one of Dove’s paintings in his office. Having presumably failed to make it as an artist himself, Mooney’s heist would be a way of reclaiming such sublimity through theft. The perfect crime is, after all, a work of art in its own right.