Kelly Reichardt’s new film, The Mastermind, centers around an art heist, and while it does depict a high-stakes caper set at a museum, there’s generally little tension. Anyone who knows anything about Reichardt’s leisurely paced filmmaking understands that that’s not such a bad thing. Calling The Mastermind boring might not exactly be an insult.
But the film’s slowness has already rankled quite a few people, including some who attended surprise screenings held at AMC movie theaters this week. In one viral post, an X user described the film as “a complete nothing burger” and “nothing but jazz music.”
The Mastermind is, of course, about more than jazz music (though it does have a nice, jazzy score by Rob Mazurek). Releasing in the US on Friday, the film stars Josh O’Connor as the bumbling ringleader of a group of men who enter the Framingham Museum of Art and pilfer several paintings by Arthur Dove, an American modernist. It’s set in the early ’70s; protests over the Vietnam War can often be seen taking place all around.
No such theft of Dove paintings ever occurred during the ’70s, however. In fact, the Framingham Museum of Art doesn’t exist at all. (As a set, Reichardt used the Cleo Rogers Memorial Library in Columbus, Indiana, which also has never been robbed in quite this way.) But Reichardt drew on a real heist from 1972 as her influence for The Mastermind, one of the few films about art crime that’s deliberately less exciting than the events that inspired it.
That 1972 theft took place at the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts, where, on a late spring day in May, two robbers took four paintings—one by Rembrandt, one by Picasso, and two by Gauguin. The museum said at the time that the paintings were worth $1 million, or the equivalent of about $7.72 million today, putting this heist among the most high-profile ones of its time. Of these paintings, Gauguin’s The Brooding Woman (1891), featuring a Polynesian woman depicted deep in thought, was the most famous.
Reichardt depicts two young women visiting the museum on an assignment from school and accidentally bearing witness to the heist. Something similar really did happen back in 1972 at Worcester Art Museum.
In 2022, the Worcester Telegram & Gazette tracked down two alumnae of Doherty Memorial High School, who were there that day to do their homework. Kathy Kartiganer, who was 17 at the time, told the publication that she had been musing on a Hubert Robert painting when she took a break to find her friend. Turning a corner, she noticed the men tearing paintings off a wall and stuffing them into bags. Once the men noticed her, one of them drew a gun. “I remember shaking, feeling like I was just gonna wet my pants,” Kartiganer said. “I’m surprised that I didn’t.”
The two girls made it out unscathed, but an unarmed guard at the museum was less lucky. When he tried to question the men, one of them shot him in the right hip. (Reichardt also depicts this, albeit in typically understated fashion.) The New York Times reported later that day that the guard had been hospitalized and was already in “good condition.”
The police quickly got to work. Not long after the heist, a getaway car was recovered and the FBI got involved. And not long after that, three men and one woman were arrested. By the end of June 1972, the paintings were all recovered and returned to the museum, without any official explanation from the FBI about how the canvases were located.
Most heisted museums are not so lucky: witness the case of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, which is still on the hunt for a Rembrandt, a Vermeer, and more that were stolen in 1990. By comparison, the Worcester Art Museum robbery is a non-event revolving around lower-valued works. The theft didn’t even make it onto a 2021 ARTnews list of the greatest art heists of all time. So why bother making a movie about it?
For one, the Worcester Art Museum is considered a first. “It was the first time that art was stolen at gunpoint in history,” Anthony Amore, co-author of a book on stolen Rembrandts, told Artnet News in 2016, the year that the film that would eventually become The Mastermind was first put into development. “It’s very ugly, it’s almost comedic, and it’s dramatic. It has a lot of good elements for the big screen.”
Dramatic, yes, but not exactly successful, since the thieves didn’t get far with their stolen art, which they didn’t manage to sell or even hold onto for very long. That may be the true reason why Reichardt made this movie: to explore why these robbers committed such a flashy flop.
Years later, Florian “Al” Monday, the true mastermind behind the heist, would offer an explanation for why he did it. “To an art lover, possessing a Rembrandt can be likened to winning the World Series, the Super Bowl, and the Stanley Cup all at once,” he told Amore and Tom Mashberg for their book Stealing Rembrandts. But Monday can’t count any of those victories. He doesn’t even have a Rembrandt, or much recognition to speak of, and neither can Reichardt’s protagonist.
Her film never quite says why he committed his crime, which is in part the point—it was a futile protest of a sort. Quickly, that protagonist gets forgotten by everyone else around him, and the heist recedes into the background of most people’s lives. Tellingly, Reichardt has even changed Monday’s name. The suggestion: Monday isn’t even famous enough to be remembered.
