Kelly Reichardt’s new movie, The Mastermind, facilities round an art heist, and whereas it does depict a high-stakes caper set at a museum, there’s typically little pressure. Anybody who is aware of something about Reichardt’s leisurely paced filmmaking understands that that’s not such a nasty factor. Calling The Mastermind boring may not precisely be an insult.
However the movie’s slowness has already rankled fairly a number of individuals, together with some who attended shock screenings held at AMC film theaters this week. In a single viral post, an X person described the movie as “an entire nothing burger” and “nothing however jazz music.”
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The Mastermind is, in fact, about greater than jazz music (although it does have a pleasant, jazzy rating by Rob Mazurek). Releasing within the US on Friday, the movie stars Josh O’Connor because the bumbling ringleader of a bunch of males who enter the Framingham Museum of Artwork and pilfer a number of work by Arthur Dove, an American modernist. It’s set within the early ’70s; protests over the Vietnam Warfare can typically be seen going down throughout.
No such theft of Dove work ever occurred throughout the ’70s, nonetheless. In actual fact, the Framingham Museum of Artwork doesn’t exist in any respect. (As a set, Reichardt used the Cleo Rogers Memorial Library in Columbus, Indiana, which additionally has by no means been robbed in fairly this fashion.) However Reichardt drew on an actual heist from 1972 as her affect for The Mastermind, one of many few movies about artwork crime that’s intentionally much less thrilling than the occasions that impressed it.
That 1972 theft came about on the Worcester Artwork Museum in Massachusetts, the place, on a late spring day in Could, two robbers took 4 work—one by Rembrandt, one by Picasso, and two by Gauguin. The museum stated on the time that the work have been value $1 million, or the equal of about $7.72 million as we speak, placing this heist among the many most high-profile ones of its time. Of those work, Gauguin’s The Brooding Lady (1891), that includes a Polynesian lady depicted deep in thought, was probably the most well-known.
Reichardt depicts two younger ladies visiting the museum on an task from faculty and by chance bearing witness to the heist. One thing comparable actually did occur again in 1972 at Worcester Artwork Museum.
In 2022, the Worcester Telegram & Gazette tracked down two alumnae of Doherty Memorial Excessive College, who have been there that day to do their homework. Kathy Kartiganer, who was 17 on the time, informed the publication that she had been musing on a Hubert Robert portray when she took a break to seek out her pal. Turning a nook, she seen the boys tearing work off a wall and stuffing them into baggage. As soon as the boys seen her, one in all them drew a gun. “I keep in mind shaking, feeling like I used to be simply gonna moist my pants,” Kartiganer stated. “I’m stunned that I didn’t.”
The 2 women made it out unscathed, however an unarmed guard on the museum was much less fortunate. When he tried to query the boys, one in all them shot him in the best hip. (Reichardt additionally depicts this, albeit in sometimes understated trend.) The New York Times reported later that day that the guard had been hospitalized and was already in “good situation.”
The police shortly set to work. Not lengthy after the heist, a getaway automobile was recovered and the FBI received concerned. And never lengthy after that, three males and one lady have been arrested. By the top of June 1972, the work have been all recovered and returned to the museum, with none official rationalization from the FBI about how the canvases have been situated.
Most heisted museums should not so fortunate: witness the case of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, which continues to be on the hunt for a Rembrandt, a Vermeer, and extra that have been stolen in 1990. By comparability, the Worcester Artwork Museum theft is a non-event revolving round lower-valued works. The theft didn’t even make it onto a 2021 ARTnews record of the greatest art heists of all time. So why hassle making a film about it?
For one, the Worcester Artwork Museum is taken into account a primary. “It was the primary time that artwork was stolen at gunpoint in historical past,” Anthony Amore, co-author of a e book on stolen Rembrandts, informed Artnet News in 2016, the 12 months that the movie that may ultimately turn into The Mastermind was first put into growth. “It’s very ugly, it’s nearly comedic, and it’s dramatic. It has numerous good components for the large display.”
Dramatic, sure, however not precisely profitable, because the thieves didn’t get far with their stolen artwork, which they didn’t handle to promote and even maintain onto for very lengthy. Which may be the true purpose why Reichardt made this film: to discover why these robbers dedicated such a flashy flop.
Years later, Florian “Al” Monday, the true mastermind behind the heist, would provide an evidence for why he did it. “To an artwork lover, possessing a Rembrandt will be likened to profitable the World Sequence, the Tremendous Bowl, and the Stanley Cup all of sudden,” he informed Amore and Tom Mashberg for his or her e book Stealing Rembrandts. However Monday can’t rely any of these victories. He doesn’t actually have a Rembrandt, or a lot recognition to talk of, and neither can Reichardt’s protagonist.
Her movie by no means fairly says why he dedicated his crime, which is partially the purpose—it was a futile protest of a form. Rapidly, that protagonist will get forgotten by everybody else round him, and the heist recedes into the background of most individuals’s lives. Tellingly, Reichardt has even modified Monday’s identify. The suggestion: Monday isn’t even well-known sufficient to be remembered.
