The Mastermind

“The Mastermind” begins with a point-of-view shot looking out from a painting at an art gallery in Framingham, Massachusetts that is being inspected by J.B. Mooney (Josh O’Connor). If it would seem to embody the whole point of the visual arts in the first place, to seek wonder and a deeper meaning of life by seeing something from a different perspective, well, that is not quite what’s happening with art school dropout J.B. As he peruses the paintings, writer/director Kelly Reichardt gradually reveals him not to be a connoisseur of art, so much, as a thief. With a conspicuously snoozing security guard in one gallery, J.B. opens a case and pilfers a toy soldier figurine, using his wife Terri (Alana Haim) and two young sons as cover in an easygoing getaway. This is not a one-off, however, but a test run as we see when he gathers “the guys” in his basement and to break down his quasi-masterplan for a much bigger heist of four works by the abstract painter Arthur Dove.

J.B. emits as supercilious air in this planning session as he does in a deft dinner table scene with his wife, mother Sarah (Hope Davis), and father (Bill Camp), the latter referencing an old acquaintance of his son who has done well by owning a company, wondering what he knows that J.B. doesn’t. J.B. responds that balancing books is an idiotic use of one’s time. Set in 1970, “The Mastermind” is perched on that precipice of 60s counterculture burning out, and that is how O’Connor plays this moment and all the others too, depleted of spirit, just sort of wearily existing within the confines of a mainstream culture. In just a few flourishes, Reichardt evokes Terri as the family glue, making dinner, paying the bills, ferrying the kids to school, the latter conveyed in a shot that strands J.B. watching them in the garage with the morning paper, standing there like an alien in his own life. In one profound moment of anti-profundity, after he has stolen the paintings, J.B. hangs one of them on his own wall, momentarily turning his home into an art gallery, observing it, as if attempting to interpret his own reason for this illegal act and coming up empty.

Like most of “The Mastermind,” the heist itself is overlaid with a cool, jazzy score functioning as dissonant mockery of the events onscreen. Nothing with the heist quite goes the way that J.B. has planned, from his kids unexpectedly having the day off from school to the latch on the back window of the car that takes way too long to undo, though the funniest detail, in fact, is that despite so much going wrong, the small crew still pulls it off, and that it only falls apart due to an event that takes place offscreen, drolly underscoring J.B.’s inability to account for everything. Indeed, when the local news files a report on the robbery, J.B.’s unsuspecting father notes that he’s not sure this heist was completely thought through, an unwitting admonishment of his son that stings more than the detectives who show up to finger J.B. as the quote-unquote mastermind.  

Christopher Blauvel’s cinematography evokes the faded, under-saturated look of the movies of the 70s, though is not in service of cheap nostalgia but to remind us of the era’s mood and to reflect the main character’s wan headspace. Indeed, as J.B. becomes fugitive, rather than the energy or pace picking up, the already leisurely “The Mastermind” slows down even more, and rather than effusing regret or even resignation, O’Connor effuses, well, nothing much at all, as if the world itself were an abstract concept. Throughout, Reichardt infuses news reports of the Vietnam War and shows protests in response to it, none of which leave an impression on J.B., and essentially cast his slow motion flee from justice not quite as dropping out of society, like the two friends with whom he briefly hides out have, but quiet quitting society instead. Yet society gets the last laugh with a denouement that would have worked as a silent comedy, ensnaring an unsuspecting J.B., punctuated by one last shot that is like the bleakest Looney Tune you have ever seen. Th-th-th-th-that’s all, folks!