It’s ironic that The Mastermind arrives in cinemas in the very same week as the theft of £80m worth of jewels from the Louvre. Inevitably, there’s a certain flair to how the imagination plays out such real-life scenarios: black turtlenecks and aviators, mopeds speeding down Parisian alleyways to the cool hit of percussion, plans made underneath a harsh, interrogatory light. There’s a little Rififi and a little Steven Soderbergh there.
Yet Kelly Reichardt’s latest is, in a way, the anti-heist film – quiet but piercingly observant, as her films (First Cow and Certain Women among them) so often are, and entirely devoid of the expected rhythms, aside from Rob Mazurek’s excited, jazzy score.
Josh O’Connor’s James Blaine Mooney is as much a petulant child as he is Danny Ocean: the son of a judge (Bill Camp) and a worrisome but financially generous mother (Hope Davis). He wanders into his local art museum in Worcester, Massachusetts, circa 1970, and is quietly thrilled to discover how easy it is to slip open a display and tuck a small figurine into his glasses case (the fictional institution, the Framingham Museum, has one of the most thematically and aesthetically atonal displays I’ve ever seen, which perhaps makes it all the more prime a target).
James is a dilettante who considers himself above both conformity and rebellion. He’ll cheerily dump his two raucous sons (Sterling and Jasper Thompson) onto his breadwinner wife (Alana Haim), while habitually crawling back into the womb of his parents’ home to make vague promises about his career – he’s been commissioned to fashion Japanese cabinets, he swears, if only mother would slip him a few hundred to rent a studio space. In reality, he’s summoned a little trio of henchmen (Eli Gelb, Cole Doman, and Javion Allen) to squeeze their heads into pantyhose and pilfer a quartet of Arthur Dove abstracts.
O’Connor, as was evident in last year’s Challengers and 2023’s La Chimera, has an ingenious way of weaponising his own earnestness. Whatever the role, there’s always something gentle about him on screen. Yet with a well-placed smirk, he twists half of it into disarming performance and preserves the other as authentic vulnerability. He rarely settles for the characters that naturally suit him, and, as a result, offers those like James new and surprising angles.
Reichardt stages the heist early and swiftly. It’s successful but comedically ramshackle: the gang are nearly caught by a little girl in a beret reciting French verse, and an elderly couple who eventually decide “they’re cleaning up in there”. James, as it turns out, hasn’t considered what happens next, and The Mastermind really becomes a film about a self-interested man attempting to escape the centripetal forces of society.
All around him we see the opposition (and the opposition to the opposition) to the Vietnam war – protesters, television documentaries, posters of Nixon, communes full of conscientious objectors. Reichardt, with her regular cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt, has a wonderful way of staging scenes that feel sparse and warm at the very same time. It offers slippery unpredictability to the ones in which a fugitive James finds shelter with some old friends, Fred (John Magaro) and Maude (Gaby Hoffmann). One romanticises him, the other sees him as a threat to their safety. Who will eventually win out?
When the inevitable comes for our protagonist, The Mastermind delivers it as one of the smartest, wryest punchlines of the year.
Dir: Kelly Reichardt. Starring: Josh O’Connor, Alana Haim, Hope Davis, John Magaro, Gaby Hoffmann, Bill Camp. Cert 12A, 110 minutes.
‘The Mastermind’ is in cinemas from 24 October
