The Mastermind starring Josh O’Connor and Alana Haim relies on a real story a couple of man named Florian “Al” Monday, but it surely takes place in a piece of architectural parafiction.
The brand new movie directed by Kelly Reichardt is about an armed theft on the Worcester Artwork Museum in 1972 orchestrated by Monday, carried out by two henchmen. In The Mastermind, Monday is renamed James Blaine (J. B.) Mooney, performed by O’Connor, a British actor. The Cleo Rogers Memorial Library in Columbus, Indiana, designed by I. M. Pei serves because the Framingham Museum of Artwork, a fictional stand-in for the Worcester Museum of Artwork.
Henry Moore’s Massive Arch was saved in-situ exterior the Pei constructing, and options prominently all through the movie, as does Eliel Saarinen’s First Christian Church. The Framingham Museum of Artwork’s inside is an off-site warehouse designed by Reichardt’s manufacturing staff, and the outside scenes had been shot in Columbus, Indiana; and Cincinnati, Ohio.
Anthony Gasparro, The Mastermind’s set designer, stated a lot of the cinematography was impressed by Stephen Shore’s pictures of dingy motel rooms. For the introductory credit, Reichardt staged a Dutch Angle shot, widespread in Seventies cinematography, overlooking Cleo Rogers Memorial Library’s sunken plaza, the place Deborah Garcia constructed an set up in 2023 as a part of Exhibit Columbus.
O’Connor’s portrayal of a middle-class hump scraping to get by in central Massachusetts is plausible to this Bostonian editor. His accent is on level, good, not too excessive like Martin Sheen in The Departed (2006).
Costume designer Amy Roth’s palette of khaki, corduroy, tweed, and everyman bluejeans; and the movie’s beneficiant parts of late fashionable structure by Pei and Saarinen make The Mastermind echo Mates of Eddie Coyle (1973), one other Boston noir gangster movie starring Robert Mitchum and Peter Boyle set towards buildings by Pei, Paul Rudolph, and Michael McKinnell.
Mates of Eddie Coyle and The Mastermind make for an apt comparability in that each movies fuse trend and structure to color a portrait of post-industrial New England, and the way glib it actually was. One feels much less sympathy, nonetheless, for Mooney relative to Coyle. Mooney is the son of a choose and lazy—an artwork faculty dropout. Coyle is a blue collar hood that by no means had a lot of an opportunity. Nonetheless, O’Connor shines in a gradual burning visible delight.
A Gradual Burn
In 1972, Monday employed beginner crooks to steal a Rembrandt, Picasso, and two Gauguin’s with out having a purchaser in thoughts. Monday didn’t have a plan in any respect, actually—therefore The Mastermind’s sardonic title. Within the dramatized model by Reichardt, Mooney (O’Connor) steals 4 work by Arthur Dove, an American summary artist, as a substitute of Rembrandt, et al.
It’s surreal watching masked louches traipse into the museum, dismount the work, put them in baggage, bicker, wrestle a feeble safety guard, and get away with priceless artworks in a station wagon, not in contrast to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist in 1990 wherein two Rembrandts and a Vermeer had been lifted. In contrast to the Gardner heist, an notorious piece of Boston lore, Mooney wasn’t so fortunate, nonetheless; the police had no drawback monitoring him down.
In Reichardt’s signature fashion, the actors in The Mastermind are opaque and transfer slowly. They don’t give us a lot. There isn’t any descriptive dialogue—actors don’t have many strains in any respect. Quite, the set and costume design do a lot of the leg work, as does the jazzy movie rating by Rob Mazurek. It’s actually not like Ocean’s Eleven or The Thomas Crown Affair. When Mooney hangs the work in his front room after studying about them on the entrance web page of a neighborhood newspaper, he stares on the wall as if what he did was actually fairly regular.
The static, entropic filmography by Reichardt locations the Vietnam Conflict within the background, making Mooney’s character that rather more jarring. Pundits on tv discuss concerning the newest information from Cambodia, and we see anti-war protesters in downtown Worcester (Columbus), however Mooney doesn’t pay any consideration to it.
Finally, The Mastermind has that grittiness I’ve all the time had a candy tooth for. Reichardt’s slice-of-life, minimalist screenplay pairs nicely with the structure curated by Gasparro and firm, inserting The Mastermind in a league of its personal.
