Ever since The Asphalt Jungle, John Huston's 1950 film about a jewel robbery, audiences and filmmakers have loved heist movies. You get the precise laying out of the plan, the robbery itself, the roaring getaway and the moment that things go wrong — there's always a snafu. A good heist movie offers the exacting pleasures of both the crime — and the plot — unfolding like clockwork.
The clock comes unsprung in The Mastermind, the latest film from Kelly Reichardt, whose devoutly un-Hollywood movies are as admired by critics as they are underseen by the public. Working with a deliberate approach all her own, she here takes the classic heist story, gives it a few tugs and shrugs, and winds up with a funny, sad movie that gets stronger and more original as it goes along.
Set in 1970s Massachusetts, and inspired by an art theft back then, The Mastermind centers on James Blaine "J.B." Mooney, a suburban family guy played by Josh O'Connor, who you'll know as the young, awkward, not very likable Prince Charles on The Crown. Quiet and hard to read behind his scruffy beard, J.B. is an unemployed cabinet maker who exudes an air of unearned superiority. He's distant with his wife, played by Alana Haim, wheedles money from his indulgent mother (that's the great Hope Davis) and feels disdain for his philistine father (played by Bill Camp), a judge who hectors his son for not getting ahead.
Pleased with his own cleverness (the movie's title is scoffing), J.B. enlists some dumb pals to help him rob the local museum and make off with four paintings by abstract artist Arthur Dove. Though his plan is simple and rather silly — put on your pantyhose masks, fellas! — it's doable in the era before 24-7 high tech surveillance.
These aren't exactly the pros who just stole the crown jewels from the Louvre. Still, they do get away with the paintings. But once J.B. has the art in hand, this spoiled manchild finds himself plunged into a real world of cops and gangsters and life on the run. This includes a visit to his friends, a hippie couple marvelously played by John Magaro and Gaby Hoffmann, that's like a desolately amusing snapshot of an entire era. Serenaded by Rob Mazurek's jazz score that both heightens and mocks his situation, J.B.'s whole life has become a snafu.
Now, as she's shown in movies as diverse as Old Joy (about two friends going camping) or First Cow (about milk thieves in the Old West), Reichardt's granular approach is far calmer and more oblique than her peers'. Seeking to catch moments that flicker with the rising sparks of life, her camera is curious about things that may seem off the point — like a garrulous child yakking happily in the museum — or accentuates something we may not have fully noticed before. As J.B. waits for his cronies in the getaway car, we register not just his anxiety but his boredom.
O'Connor is a compellingly ambiguous actor. He doesn't insist that we love him, and he commands the screen just thinking. His gloomy-eyed J.B. never tells us what he's after, but we sense that he's one of those quiet men who feel trapped in middle-class life and are prepared to chew off their paw to escape it. Where many male directors might find this heroic, Reichardt finds it deluded and often comical. She can spot a narcissist at a hundred yards.
Unlike so many crime movies, The Mastermind sets the action in a very specific time and place. Not only does Reichardt give us small-city Massachusetts in all its '70s sleepy pseudo-innocence. She also keeps J.B. — and the viewers — bumping into the story's precise historical moment, with the Vietnam war on TV, street protests and pundits talking about millions of people feeling "powerlessness, cynicism and apathy" — words that could all apply to J.B.
As it happens, the anti-war demonstrations turn out to have a bearing on J.B.'s fate. And in the moral logic that undergirds Reichardt's work, they serve as a measure of his self-absorption. The guy's so busy being a mastermind that he can't see what's going on around him.
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