The Mastermind

dir: Kelly Reichardt

2025

Hmm.

I think the title is meant to be ironic.

The Mastermind is so low stakes, despite what the jazzy 70s soundtrack would have you believe, that it’s almost a comedy. Almost. But comedy implies funny, whereas this is too wry to be openly comedic.

The central guy JB, or mastermind, if you will, is a blank chap (played by Josh O’Connor) who lives a mundane suburban life with his wife (Alana Haim, in a thankless role) and two sons. She works, and he spends most days in his boxers, dreaming of something. He is an art school dropout, and a competent carpenter, but otherwise doesn’t work. Family visits to his parents, a conservative judge (Bill Camp) and doting mother (Hope Davis) infuriate him, even though he’s way too old to be a rebellious teen.

It’s meant to be important that this is set in the 1970s, specifically 1970. The mood is intense. The war in Vietnam is escalating, and an empowered Nixon makes it feel like the spirit of activism and rebellion deserves to be crushed under the jackboots and batons of the cops and the National Guard. Previously hopeful hippies and dissidents have fled, gone underground. The tide has turned, the mood has shifted.

I don’t really see how what JB does, which is, organise the theft of four paintings from a Framingham gallery somewhere in Massachusetts, has to do with any of that, but the theft all happens early in the movie, so there’s no build up, no carefully concocted plan with meticulous precision or any of that bullshit. It just happens, but then everything runs off the rails almost immediately.

The director isn’t interested in the heist – there is far more time spent watching JB trying to hide the paintings in carefully tailored cloth bindings and a well-constructed wooden box, that he stashes in the roof above a pig sty. And when I say that’s what she’s interested in, I mean she makes us watch as JB drives to the site, removes the box from the trunk of the car, remove the paintings from the box, climb a ladder clutching two of the paintings at a time, then carry the box up the ladder, then put the paintings back in the box, then hide the box under some straw.

Does that sound fascinating to you? Does that sound like an attack on American imperialism and the domestic malaise that middle America was suffering through way back when?

When everything unravels for JB, it’s treated as an inevitability, as something that was obviously going to happen, because the amateurs he engaged to carry out the theft were absolute fuckwits, and that the ironic title is just that, ironic, because he’s neither a criminal genius nor a mastermind. He’s a somewhat lazy and intellectually incurious chap stuck at a certain level of emotional and intellectual development, who is still surprised when he essentially loses his family and has to go on the run, with nothing at all to show for any of his efforts.

He tries to stay with former art school friends, but they’re wary of him, because he’s a wanted crim, and it might bring the heat down on them. And also because it seems like art school was a long, long time ago. His opportunities keep dwindling, he never thinks of maybe getting a short term job to replenish his funds, and the grinding down continues. He morphs pretty much into the same character he played in a film called La chimera a few years ago; a homeless scrawny, scruffy guy without much of anything to do with his time.

And yet at least in that film his character was sad because he mourned someone that was dead, the Eurydice to his Orpheus, and maybe his moping about meant something. It’s hard to tell because honestly, whatever the reason, the result ends up looking the same.

I would say he’s been typecast but there’s something very believable about Josh O’Connor as a homeless fuckup who still looks stylish in a rumpled second hand suit, perhaps more believable than him playing a Catholic priest or a musicologist searching for America’s folk songs before they’re forgotten. I’m sure he has range, it’s just that they’re not giving him the opportunity to play a charming rogue like he did in Challengers, which is kinda our loss.

There are reviews that mention there are connections, or at least allusions to the works of Jean Pierre Melville, with his intricately plotted heist flicks, but I felt like there were closer references to Robert Bresson, maybe Pickpocket, which is the easy call, but then that last sequence I thought explicitly referenced L’argent, which is another baffling film filled with stiff acting where people do terrible things for money.

For a second, as JB advances on an old lady, I feared something terrible was to happen, but Reichardt wasn’t going to go there with this character, thankfully.

To say that the film builds to an ironic ending would imply there’s any momentum to what we’ve been watching, and that wouldn’t be true. I wouldn’t use the terms “listless” or “restrained”, but no-one’s going to mistake this flick for something made by the Safdie brothers, that’s for sure. There is, I think, a claustrophobic feeling Reichardt is going for, trying to get across, in terms of where JB finds himself, what kind of culture he’s trying to survive or live through or rebel against in his own obscure way. That he has, by film’s end, no avenues of escape left, no safe places to lay his hat, is not meant to be entirely his fault (I mean, clearly it is his fault, but all the same). He is neither, for most of the film, seemingly either a cruel or a stupid man, and yet his clumsy actions throughout the flick indicate a lack of thoughtfulness that maybe we’re meant to blame “the times” for, instead of simplistically acting like the reactionary judge/father, who condemns anyone sight unseen according to a strict rubric: criminals are sub-human and stupid, their punishments are well-earned for the good of a society that is in no way responsible for the crimes of its citizens.

And why go after modernist paintings, anyway, he states at some point. They look like crap.

You might also think that the art works stolen might play some part in the story, or at least be admired, described, talked about, something, anything, but they’re not. We know that JB knows who the artist is, what the paintings are, what they represent, what their value is beyond the monetary, but he never tells anyone, or even us (in what would have been a lazy voiceover, something we wouldn’t expect this accomplished director to do). Yet it remains a bit frustrating having to come up with potential meaning that feels like a bit (or a lot) of a stretch, otherwise known as projecting your own bullshit onto a blank canvas.

The paintings maybe mean a bit to JB, but his (terrible, clumsy) plans always involved selling them for money. The real crims who come after him and easily extract the paintings from him are no art lovers themselves, they’re just crims interested in cold hard cash. His wife doesn’t seem to care about art in general, this art specifically, or JB, in that she seems utterly over his bullshit possibly before the film even began. His sons, possibly twins, not sure, don’t care about art, and don’t really seem to get him either, and while he doesn’t seem like a terrible dad on the surface, he doesn’t seem like someone who gave much of a shit about them at any stage, and even now he seems baffled by them.

Though at least he calls, to stay in touch, every now and then.

The look of the flick is a triumph, if in fact you wanted to watch something as dingy and colourless as something that could have been filmed in 1970 by someone who had no interest in making anything look that good. There are clearly so many places still in the States that will never be updated, never be renovated, so films like this in this setting can continue to be made. It makes 1970 look like anything from late 1950s to 1980, as if there had been no progress in some places since the death of the very reverend Dr Martin Luther King Junior, and in many ways that stays true to this day.

Don’t go changing, America, just collapse in on yourself exactly where you currently are. We’ll wait.

The soundtrack / score (by Rob Mazurek) does so much heavy lifting that I wonder if the flick would have been bearable without it. I wouldn’t call myself a fanatical fan of Kelly Reichardt’s movies, but I am at the very least an appreciator of the fact that she does not follow any standard template when she makes her stuff. Her films can be bafflingly odd or starkly minimalist, but there is often something there that’s rewarding for the (very) patient viewer.

I have the patience of a saint, but I don’t always get what she’s doing, and that’s my loss, no mark on her, because I’m certain she knows what she’s doing. I am not entirely sure it gets across to audiences, sometimes.

Some film critics loved this flick and put it prominently on their best of lists for the end of last year, and that’s the reason I’ve watched it. Alas, for me, it’s not all that and a bag of chips. It’s amusing, it’s interesting (when it’s not tedious, which is sometimes is), and I’m often curious to see what Josh O’Connor will do with a role (I think he’s a really interesting actor, suffice to say), but other than the small smile of amusement I had over JB’s fate at the end of the flick, this didn’t really resonate with me that deeply, and as I have said / written many times before, my capacity for admiring fuckups on the silver screen is almost limitless.

Just not every time.

6 times the mastermind would have done better minding his own goddamn business out of 10

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“I sure do appreciate that once in a blue moon, someone I know and love is going to come along and blow my mind.” - The Mastermind

https://www.imdb.com/video/vi3089156121/