The Mastermind starring Josh O’Connor and Alana Haim is based on a true story about a man named Florian “Al” Monday, but it takes place in a work of architectural parafiction.
The new film directed by Kelly Reichardt is about an armed robbery at the Worcester Art Museum in 1972 orchestrated by Monday, carried out by two henchmen. In The Mastermind, Monday is renamed James Blaine (J. B.) Mooney, played by O’Connor, a British actor. The Cleo Rogers Memorial Library in Columbus, Indiana, designed by I. M. Pei serves as the Framingham Museum of Art, a fictional stand-in for the Worcester Museum of Art.
Henry Moore’s Large Arch was kept in-situ outside the Pei building, and features prominently throughout the film, as does Eliel Saarinen’s First Christian Church. The Framingham Museum of Art’s interior is an off-site warehouse designed by Reichardt’s production team, and the exterior scenes were shot in Columbus, Indiana; and Cincinnati, Ohio.
Anthony Gasparro, The Mastermind’s set designer, said much of the cinematography was inspired by Stephen Shore’s photographs of dingy motel rooms. For the introductory credits, Reichardt staged a Dutch Angle shot, common in 1970s cinematography, overlooking Cleo Rogers Memorial Library’s sunken plaza, where Deborah Garcia built an installation in 2023 as part of Exhibit Columbus.
O’Connor’s portrayal of a middle-class hump scraping to get by in central Massachusetts is believable to this Bostonian editor. His accent is on point, just right, not too over the top like Martin Sheen in The Departed (2006).
Costume designer Amy Roth’s palette of khaki, corduroy, tweed, and everyman bluejeans; and the film’s generous portions of late modern architecture by Pei and Saarinen make The Mastermind echo Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973), another Boston noir gangster film starring Robert Mitchum and Peter Boyle set against buildings by Pei, Paul Rudolph, and Michael McKinnell.
Friends of Eddie Coyle and The Mastermind make for an apt comparison in that both films fuse fashion and architecture to paint a portrait of post-industrial New England, and how glib it really was. One feels less sympathy, however, for Mooney relative to Coyle. Mooney is the son of a judge and lazy—an art school dropout. Coyle is a blue collar hood that never had much of a chance. Still, O’Connor shines in a slow burning visual delight.
A Slow Burn
In 1972, Monday hired amateur crooks to steal a Rembrandt, Picasso, and two Gauguin’s without having a buyer in mind. Monday didn’t have a plan at all, really—hence The Mastermind’s sardonic title. In the dramatized version by Reichardt, Mooney (O’Connor) steals four paintings by Arthur Dove, an American abstract artist, instead of Rembrandt, et al.
It’s surreal watching masked louches traipse into the museum, dismount the paintings, put them in bags, bicker, wrestle a feeble security guard, and get away with priceless artworks in a station wagon, not unlike the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist in 1990 in which two Rembrandts and a Vermeer were lifted. Unlike the Gardner heist, an infamous piece of Boston lore, Mooney wasn’t so lucky, however; the police had no problem tracking him down.
In Reichardt’s signature style, the actors in The Mastermind are opaque and move slowly. They don’t give us much. There isn’t any descriptive dialogue—actors don’t have many lines at all. Rather, the set and costume design do much of the leg work, as does the jazzy film score by Rob Mazurek. It’s certainly not like Ocean’s Eleven or The Thomas Crown Affair. When Mooney hangs the paintings in his living room after reading about them on the front page of a local newspaper, he stares at the wall as though what he did was really quite normal.
The static, entropic filmography by Reichardt places the Vietnam War in the background, making Mooney’s character that much more jarring. Pundits on television talk about the latest news from Cambodia, and we see anti-war protesters in downtown Worcester (Columbus), but Mooney doesn’t pay any attention to it.
Ultimately, The Mastermind has that grittiness I’ve always had a sweet tooth for. Reichardt’s slice-of-life, minimalist screenplay pairs well with the architecture curated by Gasparro and company, placing The Mastermind in a league of its own.
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