In 1970, a seemingly normal young guy decides to organize a heist of his town’s local art museum.
Kelly Reichardt makes movies that focus on the ordinary, telling stories of people navigating their unglamorous day-to-day lives, often as loners or outsiders. That might not sound interesting on the face of it, but it turns out there’s a strange kind of beauty in these lives that usually escape our notice. Sometimes Reichardt has bumped up against genres like the thriller, the period film, or the western, peeking at the reality underneath the form, while casually kicking the genres aside, like so much artistic collateral damage. This is once more the case in her new film, sarcastically titled The Mastermind, which showcases one of her least appreciated strengths, a dry sense of humor.
Josh O’Connor plays J.B. Mooney, a 30-something carpenter living with a wife and two kids in Framingham, Massachusetts in 1970. We first see him peering around furtively at a local art museum while his wife watches his kids play in the halls. He even peeks behind a few of the works of a minor abstract painter named Arthur Dove.
Mooney’s father is a retired judge and his mother, played by Hope Davis, is still expecting he’ll make something of himself. He lies to her that he needs money to start on a new project he’s been hired for, and she writes him a check. He gets together with two of his friends and lays out a plan to steal four of the Dove paintings. Security is minimal. All they need is a hot car to get away in, which they will quickly exchange with his real car after the heist. Mooney will pay his accomplices with his mother’s money. But the friend who steals the car proceeds to back out of the robbery, which means J.B. has to recruit someone else, who turns out to be an unstable criminal. The heist itself is a ludicrous mess in which the new guy beats up a security guard and points a gun at witnesses. They get the paintings, but of course the whole thing starts going south.
Ostensibly this is a heist film, but it’s one that subverts every convention of that genre. Mooney is a pathetically overconfident character who is rebelling against his middle class life without really being conscious of it. He acts like everything’s okay, comes off as an affable guy, but he’s essentially just selfish. O’Connor does wonders with this character. He’s so unassuming that you find yourself rooting for him, until you eventually don’t. We also notice that his wife, played by Alana Haim has already had enough of his nonsense.
In almost all heist movies, things ending up going wrong for the thieves. That is the case here, but The Mastermind offers a surprise by focusing mainly on the aftermath of failure. Mooney goes on a long journey trying to escape the consequences. His life ultimately gets narrowed down to the sad desperate space between his ears. Reichardt is at her best depicting the aimlessness of the road, the lonely bus rides, the dingy apartments, the friends who don’t want him to stay.
This all against the background of 1970: Vietnam, Cambodia, demonstrations, Kent State—it’s all there on television, but having virtually no impact on the everyday life of our suburban antihero. Then, at the end, the news of the world bangs right into him, suddenly and personally. Reichardt’s humor achieves a sardonic flourish, a beautiful American type of fatalism, as The Mastermind leaves us torn between laughing and crying.
