The Mastermind

Tuesday March 10 @ 1:30 pm

Crime / Drama
PG – 1hr 50min

The Mastermind is a 1970s-style character portrait of an art thief from writer-director Kelly Reichardt (Old Joy, Meek’s Cutoff, First Cow), and is perfectly titled. It captures the way the thief sees himself. But it could also be sarcastic—the kind of nickname other prison inmates would give the new guy, who’s behind bars because his estimation of his abilities doesn’t match reality.

Josh O’Connor plays James Blaine Mooney, a married suburban father of two with a secret life as an art thief. Not the Thomas Crown type of art thief; he’s a couple of steps up from somebody who’d steal a rolled-up poster from a booth at a fan convention. James’ wife, Terri (Alana Haim), doesn’t know about her husband’s secret life, only that there are times when he’s supposed to drive the kids home from school but calls to say he can’t because something important just came up. To observers beyond the Mooneys’s little circle in the Massachusetts town where they live, James might be just another handsome, charming but rather slippery young husband who’s been coasting on his unkempt charisma and is going to get cleaned out in divorce court when his wife finally decides she’s had enough.

O’Connor, as was evident in last year’s Challengers and 2023’s La Chimera, has an ingenious way of weaponising his own earnestness. Whatever the role, there’s always something gentle about him on screen. Yet with a well-placed smirk, he twists half of it into disarming performance and preserves the other as authentic vulnerability. He rarely settles for the characters that naturally suit him, and, as a result, offers those like James new and surprising angles.

O’Connor is merely the center of a brilliantly chosen ensemble, from a prim Hope Davis and a bloviating Bill Camp as JB’s parents, to a genial John Magaro and a shrewd Gaby Hoffman as the friends with whom he thinks he can hide out. Even the smallest role, like Jerry (Matthew Mahler), the henchman driver for the gangsters JB also gets mixed up with, gets the dignity of Reichardt’s attention when it’s the exact kind of moment most other filmmakers would cut away from. “A little advice from me: Never work with a wildcard,” says Jerry kindly to JB, who is quivering in the backseat. “You know, for next time.”

As in Dog Day Afternoon, one of many great 1970s character studies that The Mastermind evokes, the team falls apart when one of the other two guys bails out early. James replaces him with Ronnie Gibson (Javion Allen), a tougher, cooler criminal who is also the only Black person associated with James’ scheme. Ronnie is called a “wild card,” which sounds like a euphemism for a more experienced crook who treats a crime as a crime, not as a fun thing for middle-class white guys to do for extra money and an adrenaline rush.

With an anti-eco-thriller, an anti-buddy-road-movie and a couple of anti-Westerns under her belt, Kelly Reichardt may never have met a genre she couldn’t meticulously deconstruct. But rarely has she done so with such offbeat wit and bluesy wisdom as with anti-heist movie The Mastermind, a canny rejoinder to the glamorous high drama of the traditional robbery-gone-wrong plot, in which an extraordinary act gradually comes undone when exposed to nothing more malign than the everyday forces of ordinary life, and the fatal flaws of an ordinary man. Very possibly her most accessible and enjoyable film to date, still it remains an unmistakably Reichardtian investigation into the fabric of ordinariness and what happens when it frays.

But as James Blaine Mooney’s journey continues, the background forces its way into the foreground, and the mood becomes more sharply ironic, culminating in the ultimate in anticlimactic comeuppances, when JB — a little man getting littler with each passing day — is robbed of even the minor-key triumph of owning his own finale. Reichardt’s quietly fantastic The Mastermind is hardly moralistic, but it is a gentle, cautionary hand-on-the-arm for ordinary men who believe they are somehow entitled to more than the everyday blessings of home and family that they have grown used to: The world doesn’t owe you anything, so steal from it and it will steal from you. And probably, honey, it will do a far better job.