★★★½ (3½ out of 4)
Despite the title of writer-director Kelly Reichardt’s subtly sensational new movie, “The Mastermind” comes up short in the brains department. Remember those glamorous burglars Cary Grant or George Clooney used to embody in, say, “To Catch a Thief” or “Oceans 11?” Well, “The Mastermind” is nothing like them.
James Blaine Mooney (JB to his intimates) is an art-school dropout and unemployed carpenter who plots to steal paintings by the American modernist Arthur Dove from a local museum in Framingham, Massachusetts. Dove was hardly Picasso, but JB felt choosing the lesser-known artist proved his own taste and sophistication. Like I said, not too bright.
Played with dumbfounded disillusionment by the always compelling Josh O’Connor (the young Prince Charles on “The Crown”), JB just doesn’t have the style to look cool breaking the law. This married father of two sons is so humdrum privileged—dad (Bill Camp) is a prominent judge and mom (Hope Davis) an elitist professor—he barely looks awake. Even his supposed best friends, sharply edged by John Magaro and Gaby Hoffman, are merely a reflection of himself.
The heist itself, with a clown car of accomplices—Guy (Eli Gelb), Larry (Cole Doman) and wildcard Ronnie (Javion Allen)—is a bungled affair that Reichardt sets to a jazzy score by Rob Mazurek that has all the suspenseful verve the robbery itself lacks. Classic Reichardt, whose allergy to clichés is a rare and remarkable quality.
It’s just like the director of such gems as “First Cow,” “Old Joy,” “Meek’s Cutoff,” “Night Moves,” and “Showing Up” to put her focus on the aftermath of a job badly done. That’s when failure sets in and JB must go on the run.
Set against Vietnam war protests raging in the streets—JB doesn’t have a political thought to call his own—the film shows us a divided nation coming apart. Any resemblance to right now is purely intentional. Reichardt’s longtime cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt gets the look and texture of the 1970s just right. Not that JB would notice. He hardly ventures outside the world he sees in his head.
That kind of mordant comedy is a Reichardt specialty. It’s not the bouncy caper flick that viewers probably came to enjoy. Reichardt admirers will know from the start that “The Mastermind” isn’t really a heist film at all. It’s about an upper middle-class twit trying to break out of his own bubble of privilege without a clue how to do it.
Working with consummate actor Josh O’Connor, Kelly Reichardt once again proves she is a true cinema poet who works miracles in miniature.
Kudos to O’Connor for his refreshing lack of star vanity and his willingness to play a charmer in a film that catches JB at the very moment when his charm runs out and he’s left without a safety net. Floundering is probably the most human thing we see JB do. And O’Connor catches that revelatory moment like the consummate actor he is.
I think Olivia Colman, who played O’Connor’s mother and Queen in “The Crown,” said it best about this actor’s ability to fully inhabit a role: "Fragility, sparkle, strength, doubt: it’s all there in a second. Every scene we had together became my favorite scene.”
And it’s also all there in every second of “The Mastermind,” a chamber piece expertly constructed by Reichardt and acted by O’Connor to nudge us to look past the surface and find a character’s secret heart in the space between words. I won't say more, except to note that Reichardt once again proves she is a true cinema poet who works miracles in miniature.