Not long after Kelly Reichardt’s “The Mastermind” opens, a couple of comically blundering thieves rob a small Massachusetts museum. This burglary seems too clumsy and its stakes too modest to call the job a heist. In the movies, at least, “heist” summons up suave charmers who skillfully divest vaults of their contents before sliding into a sports car. During this robbery, the burglars fumble and snap at each other, the shriveled legs of the pantyhose pulled over their heads flapping. Almost despite themselves, the thieves finish the job but one nearly gets stuck in the museum before they finally make their getaway in a station wagon.
It’s 1970 and the guy who organized the robbery, James Blaine Mooney a.k.a. J.B., is going through interesting times, partly self-inflicted. Played by the agreeably ubiquitous British actor Josh O’Connor, J.B. doesn’t seem like a typical ringleader of a criminal enterprise, at least onscreen. He’s on the scrawny side, with a patchy beard and droopy affect. He wears clothes that look like someone else bought them for him, and lives in a nondescript suburban house with his wife, Terri (Alana Haim), and two sons whom he barely seems to notice. J.B. often seems like a kid himself, whether he’s eating dinner at the home of his parents (Bill Camp and Hope Davis) or lying to his mother about why he needs to borrow money.
J.B. planned the museum job, but the movie’s title turns out to have a distinct ironic tang; the guy hardly comes off as the master of anything, himself most of all. That’s evident throughout his arranging of the robbery, its humorously amateurish execution and its more complicated aftermath, which takes up much of the story. In some classic heist films, like, say, Kubrick’s “The Killing” and Melville’s “Bob le Flambeur,” the focus is on everything that it takes to pull off the job: the goals and logistics, the co-conspirators you can trust, the ones you definitely shouldn’t. Here, the robbery is more of a beginning in a low-key funny and sharp look at a character — as well as a larger world — in thrall to narcissistic self-interest.
Reichardt’s filmography includes micro-budgeted independent films like “Old Joy” and slightly less micro movies like “Wendy and Lucy,” “Meek’s Cutoff” and “Showing Up” (all with Michelle Williams), work that tends to be more beloved by critics than seen in theaters. As a category, independent can be a fairly meaningless, a convenient tag for work that seems offbeat or isn’t from a major studio. Yet there’s more to independence than who wrote the check and for how much; there’s also mind and spirit. In their subject and scale, Reichardt’s movies align with these vague ideas about independence, but what’s striking about them is how her ethical sensibility informs her cinematic realism. Her work moves to her beat.
Reichardt’s movies are intimate, discreet and don’t ostentatiously deviate from narrative film conventions. She doesn’t broadcast her ideas visually or with speeches but instead lets them percolate, so they trickle into the stories. “The Mastermind” is about a guy going through some things, most conspicuously a crime that soon upends what seems like an ordinary, even humdrum life. From all appearances, if things had kept going the way they had for J.B., it is a life that would probably settle into disappointment (cue the divorce, boozy ennui, the usual). It isn’t immediately clear why he robs the museum, pinching a clutch of canvases by Arthur Dove, an early American abstract painter; it’s hard not to wonder if he was just bored.
Maybe he is, but J.B. also lives in the world even if he doesn’t pay much attention to it. In an early scene, he lies on the floor playing checkers with one of his sons as the other boy roams about with a paper airplane. J.B. seems just like another one of the kids, an impression that’s reinforced by the image of his own father stretched out on a couch watching the news on television. As Reichardt cuts from among the characters, you hear voices on the TV talking about a trial and antiwar campus protests. There are “tremendous feelings of powerlessness, cynicism, apathy on the part of large numbers of people,” a voice rich in emotion says as Reichardt holds on a close-up of J.B. right before he’s called to dinner.
Once the museum robbery makes the news, J.B. is soon squeezed between oppositional forces and things go rapidly south for him. A couple of cops show up at his and Terri’s house, having been tipped off by one of his co-conspirators, and then a carful of mobsters stir up even more dangerous (and amusing) trouble. As J.B. anxiously navigates these complications, his home life takes a hit. Terri doesn’t say much from the start, yet while her relatively few words and averted gaze can speak volumes, her silence is initially disappointing simply because Haim (a musician and star of “Licorice Pizza”) is a vividly real, distinctive presence. It’s only later that it becomes clear that Terri isn’t just a supporting character in the movie but also in J.B.’s life.
O’Connor is one of the most exciting younger actors to have emerged in recent years, with an expressive breadth and depth that reveal new layers with each performance. (This is one of four movies he’s in which are slated to open this year.) He can be effortlessly charming and disarmingly sexy, but can just as easily go hard and cold. He seems to have no problem playing jerks but he also knows how to turn obnoxiousness into catnip (as in Luca Guadagnino’s “Challengers”). One of the trickier things about J.B. as a character is that he isn’t obviously likable or dislikable, which makes it hard to get a handle on him. Like the overall movie, the character opens up incrementally to quiet, meaningful effect.
Once J.B.’s situation precipitously heats up, he flees and the story shifts focus. Seeking a place to hide out, he looks up some old friends, Fred and Maude (a perfectly synchronized John Magaro and Gaby Hoffmann), who live deep in the country and seem like refugees from the 1960s. They feed J.B., crack open some beers and give him a change of clothes. Fred is surprised and tickled by his friend’s notoriety, and seems almost grateful for the excitement that the robbery has stirred up, including in his own life. Maude, on the hand, is openly wary. Late one night, she tells J.B. that she wants him to leave. “Look at the position that you’ve already put us in,” she says. She wishes him well, and makes him a sandwich for the road.
J.B.’s interlude with Fred and Maude is melancholic and quietly moving, and it condenses a world of feeling and the movie’s ideas with crystalline economy. It’s one of the few times in “The Mastermind” that J.B. seems to really listen to someone else, even if it’s not clear that he hears Maude or any of the other voices that Reichardt delicately weaves in and out as the jazz score does, too. There’s so much to hear, though, so much to take in, if you pay attention: The voice on TV addressing protests, some guys hanging in a bar talking about military service, a report about U.S. forces fighting North Vietnamese ones in Cambodia. If J.B. scarcely seems to notice these voices it’s because he’s too busy running away, too busy playing the main character of his own story and too busy moving fast and breaking things, including his world.
The Mastermind
Rated R for language and a brandished gun. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. In theaters.
Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic for The Times.
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