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 perfectly judged 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.
It is 1970 in suburban Massachusetts where it’s forever windbreaker weather, and the Mooney family are taking a trip to the Framingham Art Museum. Aside from father JB (Josh O’Connor) staring rather too intently at some Arthur Dove abstract paintings, there’s nothing to suggest we’re about to be embroiled in a caper. Except, that is, the rushing, jazzy percussion of Rob Mazurek’s score, which does such bravura work of bringing the movie into dialogue with its 1970s independent antecedents, it’s a little like Elliott Gould is constantly hovering, smirking from the sidelines. JB’s wife Terri (Alana Haim, so suited to the fashions of this “Licorice Pizza” period it suggests once again that she was born about 30 years too late to hit her peak aesthetic era) rests up on a bench. Their son Tommy (Jasper Thompson) reads a comic book, while their younger kid Carl (Sterling Thompson) prattles away incessantly, explaining at great, inarticulate length a riddle about three aliens. T always tells the truth. F always lies. And R does either at random. As a kind of family in-joke the foursome all sport lapel pins bearing a single letter. JB’s is an “F.”
Unbeknownst to Terri, and indeed to everyone except composer Mazurek who by now has added some vibraphone and a little jazz trumpet to up the intrigue factor, JB is actually casing the joint, not that a small-town art museum in the early 70s has much in the way of theft deterrent beyond a reliably dozing guard and a slow-to-react doorman. Later, in his basement JB meets up with Guy (Eli Gelb) and Larry (Cole Doman) to outline the threadbare plan he claims to have spent a lot of time thinking through. It involves stealing a getaway car, recruiting wildcard Ronnie (Javion Allen) and wearing stockings as masks, but basically it’s a smash-and-grab, without the smash.
It is almost de rigueur for any cinephile director working in this genre to include a long wordless procedural sequence as a homage to Jules Dassin’s OG heist film “Rififi.” But this is Kelly Reichardt, so it’s not how she films the heist itself, which is comically bumbling and fumbling and lo-fi. Instead, it comes later, during another mordantly funny stretch which emphasizes the sheer impractical difficulties of one man getting four framed paintings and their container up a rickety ladder to their hiding place in the loft of a barn, and to which only we, and an uninterested pig snuffling around in the straw, bear witness.
Returning bruised and dirty from that endeavor, JB discovers the police in his living room while Terri, tight-lipped, sits on the sofa. Guy had already bailed, Ronnie has squealed and Larry will soon betray him too, so it is only by invoking the name of his father, a respected local judge, that JB can buy himself enough time to pack Terri and the kids off to his parents’ house before going on the lam.
This is perhaps the register that gets the absolute best out of Josh O’Connor. In a role ostensibly similar to his “La Chimera” character, right down to the stubble, the grimy suit and the strange psychological attachment to the objets d’art he purloins, still he manages to create a wholly different character. Without the textures of soulful tragedy that etched his face in Alice Rohrwacher’s wonderful film, here his JB is a soft-spoken, put-upon nice guy. But as a hairline crack in his seemingly decent personality is worked open by overreach and unlucky circumstance, we gradually discover (because he may never) that he isn’t really that nice after all, and maybe never was. Just because you’re hapless doesn’t necessarily mean you’re harmless.
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.”
All the while, edging the frames of master DP Christopher Blauvelt’s warmly lived-in, autumnal images, there are anti-war protests and counterculture references and Walter Cronkite on TV talking about the Vietnam War’s recent spread into Cambodia. At first this background noise seems to be so much period color, like the superb production design by Anthony Gasparro, which so authentically evokes an era when pantyhose came packaged in little plastic eggs, when the back windows of station wagons could be laboriously rolled down by hand, and when the most straightforward way to note down someone’s address was to rip the relevant page out of a public telephone book.
But as JB’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.
