Filmmaker Kelly Reichardt’s visual style can be described in many ways—quiet, subtle, humanistic, etc.—but I think the best way to sum up her approach to storytelling is observational. Reichardt channels realism into her work the way a Vermeer crisply captures every detail of a moment on canvas. Often, as is the case in her latest, The Mastermind, we are simply present watching a particular moment unfold, a long take watching life happen in real time.
Inspired by a 1972 fine art robbery in Massachusetts, the first at gunpoint, Reichardt’s script fictionalizes the event and, as we get to know the thief at its center, makes it clear the title is, at least to some degree, a bit of an inside joke. Josh O’Connor, currently on a bit of a roll with The History of Sound and Sundance official selection Rebuilding coming soon, stars as James Blaine Mooney, a husband and father of two who we quickly learn is a bit of a schemer. In the film’s opening scenes, he and his family (including wife Terry (Alana Haim, branching out from her work with Paul Thomas Anderson) are at the Framingham Art Museum (which is not a real place) when he displays more than a bit of sleight of hand to steal a small figurine from an exhibit.
Soon, he’s got a plan to lift four paintings from a single gallery in the museum and he’s enlisted a couple of cohorts to help make it happen; one of them, Ronnie Gibson (Ronnie Gibson) is a bit of a hothead who escalates the otherwise mundane proceedings by pulling a gun on an unsuspecting young museum patron. Though they get away with the paintings, JB’s struggles have only just begun as the heist becomes the region’s top news story and he realizes he’s in over his head. Reichardt gives us plenty of time to contemplate all that he’s involved in during a dialogue-free extended sequence that follows JB hiding the paintings in the hayloft of a barn out in the middle of nowhere.
To the wrong viewer, Reichardt’s muted approach makes for perhaps the most boring heist film ever; there is no movie-magic technology changing anyone’s identity, no flashy strategy sessions bringing a ragtag team of criminals together. In other words, Ocean’s 11 or Mission: Impossible this is not. But to the discerning viewer, what Reichardt is doing is so much more astute, so much more compelling, breaking down the archetype of a thief and laying bare the shortcomings of a character like JB, even as he tries to outwit the authorities. Add to the mix the Mooney family dynamic, including how one of their young sons is inadvertently looped into his father’s dealings, and the proceedings take on a sort of heartbreaking sadness as well.
But even Reichardt has a bit of action up her sleeve as the film’s final few moments prove; JB is fully on the run now and getting more desperate to escape the FBI with each passing moment. It’s a tense and almost unbelievable final few scenes, as we watch JB’s dominoes fall one after another and, to mix metaphors, paint him even more deeply into a corner from which there’s no escape. O’Connor is captivating as a man who begins the film very much in control only to be extremely undone by the end of it; alongside Haim, the cast is bolstered by Bill Camp (Honey Don’t!, 12 Years a Slave) as JB’s judge father Bill and Hope Davis (The Phoenician Scheme, Cat Person) as JB’s icy but enabling mother, Sarah.
With a talent for delving into character psychology and allowing their lives to unfold undisturbed before the camera, Reichardt’s filmography has typically focused on interpersonal relationships (or those with pets and live stock, of course). In The Mastermind, JB’s most significant relationship is with himself and his own motives, making the film a fascinating investigation of ego, self-confidence and desperation wrapped up in the drama of an art heist that never really could end any other way than it does.
The Mastermind is now playing in theaters.
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