The director Kelly Reichardt encourages stillness. Her style—long takes and low stakes, often punctuated by unhurried silences—forces viewers to slow down, to immerse themselves in the atmosphere being created on-screen. Her movies can resemble landscape paintings, like those by the artist Arthur Dove. His work is featured in The Mastermind, her latest film, which mirrors the tableaus its protagonist covets: textured, abstract studies of reality that reveal their true potency over time.
James Blaine—or “J. B.”—Mooney (played by Josh O’Connor) isn’t the patient type, however. He’s an unemployed carpenter who’s grown restless amid his suburban comforts. Set in 1970 in Massachusetts, the film follows J. B. as he hatches a plan to steal four of Dove’s paintings from the (fictional) Framingham Museum of Art. His plot would make the likes of Danny Ocean cringe: It involves having two amateurs rob the exhibit in broad daylight without any plan to circumvent the security guards. The pair is then to deliver the goods to an undisguised J. B. idling in a car outside the front entrance.
Unlike the successful smash-and-grab at the Louvre last weekend, J. B.’s scheme goes awry immediately. But the robbery isn’t the primary focus anyway. The Mastermind—an ironic reference to J. B.—mines drama from its methodical deconstruction of the burglary’s aftermath. J. B. clumsily goes on the lam, leaving a trail of hurt feelings and broken relationships in his wake. That contrast, between how meticulously Reichardt builds her story and the way her protagonist pinballs through his, yields a remarkably precise exploration of hubris as a self-destructive force. The Mastermind isn’t a heist movie so much as a character study that dismantles the criminal himself, one selfish act at a time.
The film is also possibly Reichardt’s funniest thus far. The small scale of the central heist allows the director to prioritize observing how J. B.’s troubles are caused by ordinary, easily avoided obstacles. J. B. rushes through vetting his criminal collaborators, because he’s forgotten that he has to look after his sons, who don’t have school that day. A cop happens to pull into the museum’s parking lot, making J. B. panic, but J. B. didn’t have to wait in such a conspicuous spot. (Even more amusing: The officer isn’t keeping an eye out for would-be thieves at all; he’s just taking a break to eat a sandwich.) One sequence shows J. B. hiding the paintings inside the loft of a barn, only to get covered in mud after the ladder he’s using falls to the ground, leaving him stranded.
Yet J. B. is not entirely hapless either. The Mastermind makes clear that the cushy, middle-class life he leads is populated by similarly self-absorbed personalities. J. B.’s wife, Terri (Alana Haim), is so disinterested in J. B. that she can’t be bothered to see what he’s up to in the basement. His mother carefully compares the lengths of two halves of corn at a family dinner, keeping the longer one for herself while she tunes out the conversation. Buoyed by the composer Rob Mazurek’s jazzy score, the film produces a rich portrait of 1970s suburbia and the jadedness such an environment could breed: Reichardt and her go-to cinematographer, Christopher Blauvelt, immerse J. B.’s town in a warm, autumnal glow, but his home is a dimly lit series of cramped spaces, full of faded upholstery, rumpled laundry, and board games played on the floor. It’s no wonder J. B. can’t take his eyes off of Dove’s paintings, so striking in their designs and vivid in their hues. With apologies to Ariana Grande, his subsequent urge to steal them comes with a heavy whiff of thoughtless, “7 Rings”-esque materialism: He saw it. He liked it. He wanted it. He got it. He’s an inelegant protagonist, seemingly incapable of considering what happens next, because he’s never had to do so.
O’Connor is no stranger to playing an art thief, and his understated performance finds compelling shades of a man who commits such an obviously boneheaded act without a clear motive. As clues to J. B.’s mentality emerge, O’Connor imbues the character with a hangdog charisma that deepens each revelation. J. B.’s family, for instance, turns out to be wealthy enough to support him; when cops stop by his home, he sheepishly name-drops his father, the local judge, to defend himself. Even when he goes on the run, J. B. moves through the world as if everything will turn out fine for him. He seems genuinely shocked when he’s told he can’t stay with two art-school friends of his for more than a night.
What J. B. has aced is clearly not the art of persuasion or thievery. His real specialty, The Mastermind suggests, is his ability to tune out everything but his own wants and needs. Reichardt blankets the world around J. B. with period-specific details: She lets the audience notice the Army-recruitment poster affixed to the wall behind J. B. at a bus station, the radio reports about the Vietnam War that play in the background while J. B. concentrates on assembling a false passport for himself, and the protests in the streets of Cincinnati that J. B. casually wanders into. Images of flimsy objects pepper the film too, conjuring a sense of inevitability to J. B.’s comeuppance. Reichardt lingers on the paper plane that one of J. B.’s sons grips while running through the museum, as well as a woman dashing through the streets amid a downpour with only a newspaper to shield her. The life J. B. has led, as mundane as it is, has never been sturdy either. By taking it for granted, J. B., who doesn’t actually steal very much from the museum, robs the most from himself.
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