The Mastermind

"Loneliness is not the absence of people, but the absence of meaning."
— Erich Fromm

The museum where the theft takes place is located in the city of Framingham, Massachusetts. The space is designed as publicly accessible yet inattentive: sparsely monitored corridors, distracted guards, unalarmed display cases — conditions that allow J.B. to linger among the rooms, observe the artworks, study visitors’ movements, and wait for the right moment to act.

The stolen works are attributed to the American modern artist Arthur Dove (painter of abstraction and interior landscapes). Mentioned titles include Willow Tree (1937), Yellow Blue Green Brown (1941), Tree Forms (1932), and Tanks & Snowbanks (1938). These paintings, suspended between abstraction and nature, become in the film symbols of a beauty that Mooney wishes to claim as a pledge of a new existence, perhaps…

The narrative event is inspired by the real 1972 theft at the Worcester Art Museum, where two Gauguins, a Picasso, and a work from Rembrandt’s workshop were stolen during normal visiting hours. This historical episode acts as a latent substrate: suggesting that, at certain moments, cultural order can be violated by seemingly trivial means.

What makes the theft in the film surreal is the manner in which it is carried out: not with sophisticated technology, nor elaborate disguises, but with simple gestures (masks made from L’eggs pantyhose, canvas bags, improvised scaffolding) and a lightness bordering on irony.

In an early moment, J.B. wanders through the museum seemingly innocently, observing the paintings and mentally planning the heist. In an almost ritual gesture, he opens a display case, removes a small figurine, hides it in a glasses case, and slips it into his wife’s bag — all in front of another inattentive guard. This prologue heightens the tension between normalcy and transgression, between the public and the secret.

The ease with which the group exits with the four paintings — no alarms, no eyes on them — creates a disorienting effect: it is not a Hollywood-style heist, but something resembling the “silent invasion” of a cultural space. Reichardt exploits this dissonance to highlight how, at certain times, the cultural system could be vulnerable.

The Mooney family is a microcosm of latent tensions. J.B. is married to Terry, and they have twin sons, Carl and Tommy. Terry is portrayed as patient and devoted to the household, bound in domestic responsibility that often isolates her from her husband’s “subversive” project. The children, curious and distracted, wander the museum corridors with comics in hand, occasionally interrupting their father’s actions.

J.B.’s mother, Sarah Mooney, has contacts with the museum (through her social status) and provides loans to facilitate her son’s supposed project, which he misrepresents. The father, Judge Bill Mooney, is a reflective figure: he comments wryly that he “isn’t convinced those abstract paintings were worth all that effort.”

Through Reichardt’s editing, we witness the double bind: J.B. must maintain the facade of father and husband while hiding a plan that distances him from his family. The tension explodes under the weight of guilt and disillusionment.

One of the film’s most evocative interludes is the scene in which a young woman — apparently a visitor or student — recites aloud a list of “faults” attributed to men and women: superficiality, selfishness, vanity, inability to listen, obsession with appearance. This enumeration acts as a moral and social commentary: that voice (almost a collective whisper) recurs as a counterpoint, echoing to challenge the value of human relationships, the mask of masculinity, and affective expectations.

The scene functions as an unsettling pause: away from technical crime, it opens a poetic field where the world of feelings and human limitations is verbalized. In that moment, the museum is not merely a space of contemplation but a forum where sarcastic judgments settle.

Rob Mazurek’s nervous and contrapuntal music plays a constant and subtly invasive role throughout the film. His jazz score — featuring trumpet, percussion, and improvisation — does not merely accompany but comments: introducing a subtle tension, pacing J.B.’s emotional rhythm, and sometimes anticipating it.

The score is nuanced: during quieter moments it recedes into the background, but in hours of planning, doubt, and escape, it becomes more nervous and pressing, like a heartbeat that interrupts silence. Mazurek, alongside drummer Chad Taylor and other collaborators, has created a sonic fabric that dialogues with the ’70s aesthetic, composed of analog tensions, improvisation, and melancholy. His music, a central protagonist, provides an emotional jolt: when the camera lingers on emptiness, Mazurek “injects” nervous energy, producing a productive contrast.

With these elements, the film further enriches itself through subtraction. The museum and the paintings become central symbols of the failure of aesthetic appropriation: J.B. thinks he can “take” beauty, but beauty unravels him from within. The family is simultaneously a lifeline and a cage of unrecognized responsibility. The detail of the girl enumerating faults functions as a meta-moral reflection reverberating on the protagonist and the audience. Finally, the soundtrack is not mere accompaniment but an active sonic agent shaping the film’s emotional experience.

In The Mastermind, Kelly Reichardt stages the agony of an illusion with the obsessive calm of a creaking mechanism. It is not a high-paced thriller but a slow descent into the tangle of identity, frustration, and the dissolution of self. The heist — paradoxically planned as a liberating act — turns out to be the catalyst of J.B.’s self-destruction.

The result is a political and existential reflection: in a convulsing America (protests, the Vietnam War, social crises), the individual act (the theft) becomes at once a desperate and confused gesture. J.B. does not challenge order; he consumes himself in an interiority unable to inhabit contradiction. Reichardt provides no guidance: she does not forge a hero, but places the viewer within the uneasy space of a man who believed he could change the world — perhaps only his own — and is instead consumed by his own dissonant echo.

"Failure is the magnifying glass of life."
— F. Caramagna