When the jazzy, jittery opening of Kelly Reichardt’s “The Mastermind” begins with sluggish, vertically crawling title playing cards in Bauhaus-like font, you realize you’re about to be thrown again in cinematic time.
Shot on movie with the grainy heat that evokes a sleepy 1970 New England municipality as a lot because it does precise films from the ‘70s, “The Mastermind” is Reichardt’s model of a heist film — that means that the filmmaker hijacks conventions laid by filmmakers like Jean-Pierre Melville and Sidney Lumet for a spin that also retains her affected person bent for lengthy, luxuriating takes. Right here, Josh O’Connor performs J.B. Mooney (what a reputation!), an artwork thief who falls down a gap of his personal digging, as a poorly hatched job to tear off a sequence of Arthur Dove summary work from a fictional Massachusetts museum sends his non-public and household lives careening out of his grasp.
“The Mastermind” is extra an aftermath-of-a-heist film than one concerning the job’s high-stakes particulars, although Reichardt captures them with breath-bating suspense within the movie’s first act. Reichardt, writing her personal script, is extra invested within the what-happens-after, the slow-drip comedown of J.B.’s catastrophic hubris in considering he may perform a grab-and-run theft in such a small city. Particularly when his father (Invoice Camp, hilariously curmudgeonly as an old-guard kind who sticks his nostril up at fashionable artwork) is its native decide.
The absorbing setup makes for Reichardt’s purest style train since her eco-terrorist caper “Evening Strikes” (2013) or her slow-cinema anti-Western “Meek’s Cutoff” (2011) earlier than that. Her observational method doesn’t at all times retrofit seamlessly to the style scaffolding that surrounds it — a construction she is going to slowly work to topple and destroy as “The Mastermind” grows extra languorous — however the period-rich environment she conjures with cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt and costumer Amy Roth makes for an intoxicating, transportive expertise. And her composition and framing, and eye for 1970 in all its mustardy polyester and corduroy-browns and retro fuzziness, suggests the affect of her expensive pal Todd Haynes greater than ever, this time round. (Stalwart Reichardt DP Blauvelt additionally shot Haynes’ “Might December.”)
Matted and charmingly louche in that unkempt early-’70s manner, J.B. is an unemployed carpenter who lives in a sedate Massachusetts suburb together with his working spouse Terri (Alana Haim) and two boys (Sterling and Jasper Thompson, real-life fraternal twins). He’s in perpetual debt to his moneyed dad and mom (Hope Davis and Camp), and judging by their weekly ritual of a meat-and-mashed-potatoes dinner at mother and pa’s home, he hasn’t strayed removed from the nest financially, geographically, or emotionally. It’s 1970, and radio dispatches and tv information relay fragmented context concerning the ongoing Vietnam Battle, putting an virtually apocalyptic backdrop behind the movie’s core home narrative as violence seeps from afar into the on a regular basis.
A former artwork historical past pupil, J.B. lives a double life as a petty artwork thief, subtly purloining a small picket artifact from the glass case of a Framingham Museum of Artwork gallery within the movie’s first scene, virtually as a lark, a self-started dare to see if he can do it. That double life extends to covert basement huddles he hosts together with his ragtag group of accomplices beneath the primary ground of J.B. and Terri’s single-story home (this consists of actors Eli Gelb, Cole Doman, and Javion Allen), as he prepares for the following, larger job. Reichardt doesn’t in any respect discover the internal lifetime of Terri, although Alana Haim (a longtime breakout actor after Paul Thomas Anderson plucked her from the music scene for his “Licorice Pizza”) cuts an alluring silhouette in uncommon moments onscreen — like a shot of her performed up in hair curlers heading out to her automotive, or heard offscreen over a slyly unhappy, hushed telephone name later within the movie.
What J.B. has deliberate subsequent feels doomed from the beginning, and “The Mastermind” is a research in doom from the beginning. He and his associates — who all get their very own particular person quirks and styling, courtesy of Roth and hair stylist Anna Maria Reyer — plan to steal a collection of work by Upstate New York artist Arthur Dove (whose summary pastels have been recreated for the movie) from the Framingham in broad daylight. Reichardt levels the heist as a nail-biting montage, reducing from contained in the museum the place J.B.’s males set upon their theft to inside the gold ‘64 Chevy Nova J.B. waits in out entrance (Reichardt, as along with her final seven movies, does modifying duties, too). A lot of “The Mastermind” is spent in vehicles, both stationary or on the transfer and the run, Blauvelt’s digital camera putting us within the backseat or hoodside of the boxy autos which are scene stealers of their very own.
All of it goes to shit, in fact, particularly as soon as J.B. Black cohort Ronnie Gibson (Allen), nylon stocking now unsheathed from his face, pulls a gun on a possible witness out entrance of the museum. His destiny because the scheme unravels and unwinds will get a principally surface-level racial politics inquiry from Reichardt, and it’s unsurprising when he’s the primary one to land in jail. Usually talking, Reichardt’s social commentary is simply surface-scratching, the fractious Civil Rights dynamics and wartime unrest relegated to these TV information briefs, the protest posters papered on partitions all through city. That’s maybe to reveal how unaffected and unscathed that J.B., a comfortably middle-class white man who comes from a comfortably middle-class household, is from all that noise of draft dodgers, dope fiends, and radical feminists banging on the door. Till he, in fact, finally isn’t.
The fallout of J.B.’s messy hijack is much less hermetic than its setup, with the cops on the horn and Terri catching scent of what’s happening. “The Mastermind” turns into a lonely existential man-on-the-run film as J.B. sloppily covers his tracks and tries to vanish; an extended take, although, of J.B. trying to stow the work in a barn, dragging himself again dwelling at daybreak coated in pig slop, is among the many most thrilling of Reichardt’s profession. She’s flexing into style mode whereas additionally pulling from her signature paintbox of taciturn character statement, as sluggish a burn as near-silent moments out of “First Cow” and even “Outdated Pleasure.” (Reichardt, too, brings her “First Cow” actor John Magaro into the combination, in a job that feels extra like a cameo than anything.)
There’s additionally Rob Mazurek’s Invoice Evans-inspired jazz rating to sink us even deeper right into a film that’s all about capturing a temper, a vibe. Reichardt credit data from Solar Ra and John Coltrane as influences behind the trumpet-and-percussion thrum of the music, although the riffs of Miles Davis’ ennui-and-smoke-drenched “Elevator to the Gallows” rating additionally come to thoughts, placing “The Mastermind” extra in dialog with midcentury artwork movies than the American heist films whose kind Reichardt flouts.
Which signifies that “The Mastermind,” even with an successfully understated efficiency from in-demand actor O’Connor as a person making an attempt to outwit his personal unraveling, could possibly be a troublesome promote for audiences exterior of the core Reichardt cult. The movie spins its wheels towards the tip, even whereas touchdown on a hilariously macabre last picture that feels ripped out of essentially the most nihilistic of French arthouse classics. “All the pieces I’ve performed is for you and the youngsters,” J.B. tells Terri over the telephone at one level, earlier than pausing so as to add, “And me.”
“The Mastermind” is a research in a single man’s selfishness, his compulsion towards crime as a thrill sport, towards daring himself to execute a problem to shake up his personal humdrum day-to-day schtick. In that sense, Reichardt has one thing in frequent along with her antihero: She’s challenged herself to execute a well-trodden form and magnificence of style storytelling on her personal phrases, although she succeeds greater than we all know from body one J.B. ever may.
Grade: B
“The Mastermind” premiered on the 2025 Cannes Movie Pageant. MUBI will launch it in theaters later this 12 months.
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