‘The Mastermind’ Review: A Sneakily Bitter Portrait of a Nation

J.B. Mooney (Josh O’Connor) doesn’t transfer like a thief. Perpetually shambling alongside together with his shoulders hunched and forehead furrowed, he treats any process—from robbing a museum to taking care of his two children for a day—with the identical disdainful reluctance. Hardly a probably middle for a heist movie, however writer-director Kelly Reichardt’s early-Nineteen Seventies-set The Mastermind is much less involved with the mechanics of stealing than with teasing out what, if something, makes O’Connor’s hapless, largely unemployed ne’er-do-well tick.

J.B. lives an apparently steady existence together with his spouse, Terri (Alana Haim), and two sons, Carl (Jasper Thompson) and Tommy (Sterling Thompson), within the Boston suburbs. Not lengthy after testing out the native artwork museum’s safety by swiping a figurine within the movie’s opening, we discover him interesting to his school professor mom (Hope Davis) for a mortgage, claiming to want some capital for a carpentry challenge he’s been commissioned for. Its actual use, of course, is as fee for the small-time crooks he’s recruited to steal 4 summary work by the real-life artist Arthur Dove from the identical museum. J.B.’s plan, which offloads the monetary and bodily threat of the heist to these round him, is our first clue to the void on the core of his scruffy exterior.

The Mastermind marks a new chapter in Reichardt’s ongoing tapestry of American life by means of the eyes of its eccentric outsiders, particularly capping off a trilogy concerning the intersection of artwork and commerce at differing phases of American capitalism. However the place First Cow and Exhibiting Up provide sympathetic portraits of artists striving for private expression regardless of opposed materials circumstances, Reichardt’s script right here focuses on the (tried) exploitation of others’ expression for materials acquire. J.B.’s slackerdom appears to exist within the hangover of the ’60s, when—as we discover out from two of his longtime mates, Fred (John Magaro) and Maude (Gaby Hoffmann)—he himself was an artwork pupil, admiring the Dove portray above his thesis adviser’s desk.

There’s greater than a trace of envy to J.B.’s plan, together with his need to own and revenue from artwork with out doing the work of an artist representing one other of his attribute shortcuts. For Reichardt, who struggled to finance a follow-up to her function debut, 1994’s River of Grass, for a 12-year interval that almost drove her out of filmmaking, the topic feels private.

Suffice it to say that the heist doesn’t go effectively, and the low-keyness of your complete affair extends past O’Connor’s efficiency. The Mastermind realizes its interval setting in drab earth tones and grey, hazy skies, its texture offered largely by particulars like unappetizing meals (steamed peas and carrots, quick meals that assessments the definition of “meals”) and the ever present hum of televisions tuned to protection of the Vietnam Battle and its accompanying protests.

Vietnam is all over the place within the movie, shifting from what seems to be interval window dressing to a central function within the movie’s construction. The closest factor Reichardt gives to a stylistic flourish is a 360-degree pan round a boarding home room that locates, amongst different issues, Walter Cronkite reporting on the bombing of Cambodia earlier than touchdown again on the oblivious J.B.

The solipsism embodied in that shot is in some ways the movie’s true topic, whether or not on a international scale or in J.B.’s conduct as a husband and father, as he saddles his spouse and even youngsters with masking for his misdeeds. There’s no point out of a political previous amongst Fred and Maude, however J.B. isn’t above making a flirtatious go at Maude whereas Fred sleeps. Reichardt’s intentions don’t absolutely reveal themselves till the movie’s sensible last shot, each a joke at J.B.’s expense and a bitter commentary on a nation more and more working by his personal blinkered logic.

The ending casts every thing prior in a totally different mild—one which justifies Reichardt’s desire for comedy of embarrassment over the taut suspense thriller steered by the movie’s logline. Efficient as it’s, there’s a schematic aspect to The Mastermind’s building that limits the scope of its notion. Reichardt’s biggest power has at all times been a sure type of portraiture, an immersion in character and atmosphere that implies wealthy private histories and negotiations of social orders with minimal clarification. J.B., although, feels locked into the filmmaker’s bigger design, arrange from the start for his (deserved) comeuppance.

The place her biggest works floor themselves in specificity and in so doing illuminate common concepts and feelings, Reichardt right here appears to have began with a thesis and labored backwards. That extends to the route as effectively. The place the photographs in movies like Wendy and Lucy and Meek’s Cutoff teem with the likelihood of what lies simply off display or underneath the floor, right here they extra narrowly illustrate the development of the script. The Mastermind closes its loop with an successfully depraved sense of humor, but it surely comes on the value of the openness that has made Reichardt one of the nice American filmmakers of her period.