Josh O'Connor in a scene from The Mastermind.The Associated Press
The Mastermind
Written and directed by Kelly Reichardt
Starring Josh O’Connor, Alana Haim and John Magaro
Classification N/A; 110 minutes
Opens in Montreal Oct. 24 before expanding to Toronto and other cities Oct. 31
Critic’s Pick
A third of the way through The Mastermind, Kelly Reichardt’s latest and wonderful view-askew look at Americans entirely unsuited to their time and place, an unemployed carpenter and father of two in 1970 Massachusetts named JB carefully moves a cache of stolen paintings from one place to another. The sequence, set inside a hayloft in the middle of the night, is a dryly hilarious study in ultra-patient cinema, with Reichardt shooting JB carefully going up and down a ladder for what feels like nine minutes straight.
Is the director toying with her audience? Partially, yeah. But Reichardt is also focused on pushing us into JB’s deluded headspace – a master thief who should be full of slick swagger, but is in fact a snail-paced schmuck who doesn’t have the faintest idea what he’s doing, or even why. As is the case with much of Reichardt’s work, The Mastermind is a genre movie that zeroes in on a formula only to meticulously scrawl over it in jet-black ink.
Just as Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff was a Western with far more on its mind than conquering the frontier and Showing Up was an art-school comedy that resisted any kind of metaphorical or literal framing device, The Mastermind is an anti-heist movie that skips over the adrenaline rush of a high-stakes score to wrestle with the more ugly and complicated comedown. (It also marks a return to the scene of the crime for Reichardt, following her 2013 eco-terrorism thriller Night Moves, 2019’s milk-bandit buddy comedy First Cow, and, in its own on-the-lam way, her 1994 debut, River of Grass.)
Loosely inspired by a real-life 1972 theft of a handful of masterworks from the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts – and arriving at the accidentally perfect time, thanks to last week’s Louvre break-in – the film only briefly allows us to believe that JB is in control of his scheme. He has seemingly hired the right goons, scoped out his hometown museum to the finest detail and secured a stolen car to ensure an untraceable getaway. But once he and his team make off with a handful of work from the real-life abstract artist Arthur Dove, the irony of the film’s title becomes acutely clear.
Quickly, JB (played with beguiling intrigue by Josh O’Connor, today’s busiest leading man) finds himself the target of law enforcement, local crooks who want their cut of the score and the ire of his in-the-dark family, including his quietly furious wife Terri (Alana Haim) and straight-arrow judge father (Bill Camp). With no real plan to fence or otherwise offload the stolen paintings – there is a brief moment late in the film that hints at the real, entirely non-financial motive for the crime, but it is far from the key to unlocking the whole endeavour – JB goes on the run.
Alana Haim in a scene from The Mastermind.The Associated Press
But to what end, Reichardt is delightfully coy.
Not that the filmmaker is short on ideas. While Reichardt has never been the apolitical type – 2008’s Wendy and Lucy might be the best movie about the George W. Bush era – The Mastermind feels like her most damning statement yet. Set at the height of the Vietnam War and the protests around it, the film paints JB as a man of perfect indifference. He might pick up the newspaper every morning from his driveway, but like a kind of proto-typical if far more mild-mannered Tony Soprano, he’s only interested in the headlines about his own crimes and misdemeanours.
By the time JB is confronted with the real political realities of the day – in a brutal sequence that feels almost too perfectly constructed, as if Reichardt reverse-engineered the script from a solitary gag – it’s too late. For JB, of course, but also every other faux-mastermind who thought they could get ahead in America by keeping their heads in the sand.
JB is at no risk of selling out to the Man, but only because he never had anything of value to offer anyway. With or without the Arthur Dove.