For three decades now, the director Kelly Reichardt has been making films about American escape artists: drifters and dreamers, rough sleepers and revolutionaries, full-of-it swindlers and disillusioned soldiers, plus more than a few ostensibly honest people caught up in the churn. When we first meet J.B. Mooney (Josh O’Connor) at the start of The Mastermind, he appears firmly in the latter category. A family man and a carpenter with a house in the Boston suburbs, J.B. seems merely to have fallen on hard times. It’s 1970, he’s unemployed, and the U.S. is preparing a ground invasion of Cambodia. Not that any of this seems to bother him much. Instead, he spends a lot of time at the Framingham Museum of Art, circling a gallery of abstract paintings by the American modernist Arthur Dove.
Yet as indicated by the title (and Rob Mazurek’s propulsive jazz score) J.B. has considerably more on his mind. The Mastermind is not Reichardt’s first heist caper—by my count, it’s her fourth—but it begins as her most direct. J.B. wants those Dove paintings, and after weeks spent casing the joint, he’s assembled a crack team to get them. Just kidding; we’re talking about a Kelly Reichardt film here. The heist itself is little more than a smash and grab, pulled off by a group of townie deadbeats, with an unwitting assist from J.B.’s wife Terri (Alana Haim), and unknowingly funded by his mother (Hope Davis). That it ends with all the paintings safely stored in his attic is false consolation. This is America; of course things don’t work out for the little guy.
Not that J.B. would describe himself as such. If pressed, I don’t know that he would say much about himself at all. A loner propped up by a community, bluffing his way through the role of father, husband, and son, he is always misleading someone, often himself. He holds himself as an everyman apart, mocking his conservative parents but unafraid to mislead them into extending him yet another loan. Terri works, takes the kids to school, washes his clothes, and even sews a set of canvas cases to carry the stolen paintings. Meanwhile J.B. lazes around in his boxers and doesn't even notice what she’s wearing, or that she seems to have given up on him long before the police come to their house and toss the place.
If J.B. feels pride in anything, it’s probably in his carpentry. He’s an artisan—and, as we learn, an art school dropout—a handcrafter in an age of serial fabrication. When his father praises a local competitor with jobs all over town, J.B. dismisses him as little more than a money man, unable to build a good cabinet or pull off a job on his own. Yet when it comes to his own heist, he’s more than happy to shunt the labor to his fuck-up friends, keeping his hands clean of criminal drudgery. You get the sense his career probably foundered long before the work dried up.
This makes him a typical Reichardt lead, and a role so tailored to O’Connor’s slump-shouldered shithead strengths you can hardly believe they haven’t worked together already. In both look and tone, Reichardt is drawing from a legacy of shaggy, spiky ’70s character studies, and her star is game to play an affable loser. O’Connor excels at playing caddish romantics, men who weaponize innate gifts and hangdog confidence to dupe the people around them. J.B. is not nearly so smooth an operator, and so O’Connor plays him essentially as a domestic con artist, a man whose aw-shucks middle American sheen and scruffy good looks disguise a fundamental opacity. For all its autumn tones and cozy sweaters, The Mastermind is an aloof, opaque film about a man who exists entirely on the surface of self-knowledge, incapable or unwilling to question why he does what he does, or wants what he wants.
The Mastermind is Reichardt’s third film in a row about a frustrated artist. First Cow’s Cookie (John Magaro) is a fantastic baker without the means or the opportunity to express himself. He might dream of opening a hotel down in California, but for now he has to filch basic ingredients from the same frontier barons who are paying for his product. Showing Up’s Lizzy (an exhausted Michelle Williams) has the materials, but not the time. She has a gallery show coming up, probably her first in a very long while. But rather than working, she’s chasing down her landlord, mediating between her divorced parents and deeply unwell brother, and taking care of a wounded bird—not to mention running admin at her alma mater, an art school she left years ago, with seemingly nothing to show for it.
These are lonesome characters, isolated by their means and their practice, persistently frustrated by the knowledge that they could accomplish something great, if only their true labor held any temporal or monetary value. Badgered by students and unconsciously belittled by more successful peers, Lizzy is probably as close as Reichardt, a Bard College professor, has come to directorial self-portraiture. Yet however ground-down and lonely she appears between all those late-night hours stolen in the garage, the dawn trips to the kiln, the nightmare of negotiating with friends and family—it all enables Lizzy’s ultimate labor of love: the gathering together of a community twice over, in flesh and clay. For Cookie and Lizzy, art makes life worthwhile, whether life deserves it or not.
The Mastermind caps an unusually concentrated period for the director. Since 1994’s River of Grass, Reichardt has directed heist capers, frontier Westerns, experimental shorts, eco-thrillers, and rural romances. She has directed the best performances of Michelle Williams’s career, and put Lily Gladstone on the map seven years before Killers of the Flower Moon. Among a certain kind of movie fan—patient, humanistic, attuned to ever-so-slight shifts of emotional weather—she is something close to a god, and inarguably the greatest director of her generation.
Now, that’s an awfully small cohort, one without a lot of weight to throw around at the box office. There does not seem to be a single film whose production and distribution were not a battle of one kind or another. River was barely released, she financed 2006’s Old Joy with money inherited from an aunt, and when she asked repeat partner A24 to up the budget for Mastermind, they passed on the film altogether. There’s a fleetness to her work, a quality at productive odds with her intimate subject matter and stoic editing rhythms. When Will Oldham’s character in Old Joy announces that “I never got myself into something I couldn’t get myself out of,” you sense more than a bit of artistic identification. There would be no movies, otherwise, no independence and no freedom.
Still, there is an expansiveness and a drive to The Mastermind that is genuinely new in her work. Few would describe Kelly Reichardt as an action filmmaker, but I’m about to. Her films are fundamentally about watching people work, extrapolating who they are from what they do. Her eco-thriller Night Moves manages to make the lo-fi labor of blowing up a dam (buying a motorboat, building a fertilizer bomb, skulking around in the dark) into high-tension stuff, without music or fireworks. She has a Bressonian affection for hands and the work they do. In her films, even an act of impulsive violence is depicted with careful observation.
So it matters to the Reichardt project that J.B. Mooney is not working. His alienation is both physical and spiritual, the frustrated ennui of a man who longs for an outlet and comes up empty. Perhaps he stole the paintings to sell, perhaps to squirrel them away. Perhaps he concocted the entire plan just to give his life a shape. He seems infinitely more comfortable when stashing away the stolen goods than he does relating to his kids or pleading with his wife. Swaddled in the loving embrace of family and suburbia, he acts like a man living hand-to-mouth, creating new problems so that he—and the women in his life—can solve them. Like a cornered animal, he must do something, or die. It’s not so much a high-wire act as a slow ascent up a shaky ladder with no way to climb back down. As someone tells him once the scheme has already fallen apart: “I don’t think you thought this one through.”
Yet even when J.B. has gone on the run, hiding out with a pair of art school friends, his dissembled justifications are just another act, played to an audience of one. Hitching his way west, he enters a society of drifters and dropouts, vaguely countercultural types limning the edges of a broader American dissolution. For the longest time this remains out of view, on TVs glimpsed through windows, or playing to no one in seedy boarding houses. But this is 1970, not yet six months after Kent State, and violence like that can’t stay bottled for long.
In its final act, The Mastermind conducts a kind of magic trick, narrowing to fit a single paranoid perspective while at the same time opening up to encompass a world of violence and social breakdown. The closing minutes contain the most compressed, concise filmmaking of Reichardt’s entire career, a set of highly pressurized tension-and-release set pieces conveyed entirely by O’Connor’s desperate eyes. Like the country around him, J.B. is in far too deep to ever dig himself out again. Every American believes himself a man apart until, all at once, he isn’t.
