The opening of “The Mastermind” drops the audience into a sleepy regional art museum and offers us the joy of watching Josh O’Connor case the joint and lift a small figurine — aided and abetted by the kids (Jasper Thompson and Sterling Thompson) of adrift, unemployed family man James Blaine Mooney (O’Connor), talking a lot of adorable nonsense. It promises us fun. It promises us a heist.
But Kelly Reichardt hasn’t made a heist film. As is the writer and director’s wont, she’s done something much more sensitive and precise, about a much sadder protagonist.
Much like the small piece that Mooney pockets and then slips into his wife Terri’s (Alana Haim) purse, his scheme to steal some Arthur Dove paintings is painfully small, and the film keeps recontextualizing just how small it is as our man’s scheme unravels. Reichardt does this in a lot of different cinematic ways — the film’s slow winding down of its Rob Mazurek addictively jazzy score is actually worthy of the frog caught in boiling water metaphor — but a key one is through how the film creates its place and period: New England, and, then, later, a road-trip into the heart of the country, in 1970.
Reichardt films usually have a strong sense of location (see: “Certain Women”) and movement (“Meek’s Cutoff”), or the lack thereof (“Wendy and Lucy”). On “The Mastermind,” production designer Anthony Gasparro was responsible for transforming Cincinnati into a throwback version of Massachusetts on a small film’s budget. They settled on Ohio because the environs of Cincinnati still have the kind of details that have been erased from the contemporary Northeast.
“You can find different areas where there’s still hanging streetlights, but Anthony Gasparro and his team really did a lot,” Reichardt told IndieWire on the latest episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit Podcast. “I like the small industrial town, where industry leaves. Like, Worcester did have a small museum where you would have a small museum in a town. That’s an East Coast thing… There was an I.M. Pei library for some reason in Columbus, Indiana, where these modernists came. That’s where we shot the exterior of the museum.”
Gasparro and his team brought in a lot of period details and color to evoke a more East Coast feel — and Reichardt and her team painted out a lot of modern cameras and “a lot of other crap” — in post, as the budget-conscious way of setting the dramatic stage “The Mastermind” needs. The film patiently follows Moody’s petty family dinners, boring routines, lies to his parents (Bill Camp and Hope Davis), and scheming about town, repeating locations and making the soundscape so peaceful as to make you understand why Mooney’s pressing against the edges of a very limited, unsatisfying life. But then, after the heist, Reichardt finds canny ways to insert a sense of the wider world, one Mooney ignores at his peril and, eventually, catches up to him.
“I liked the idea of making something set in Massachusetts,” Reichardt said. “[In] the political moment of 1970 and being kind of in the haze of the end of the ‘60s. There’s Cambodia. There’s union fights going on. There’s the Weather Underground starting to blow stuff up. It’s Kent State. Jackson had a shooting. So it’s a polarizing time, but it’s also [the moment of] disillusionment of the ‘60s. This character, I think, he’s someone who’s rebelling against his middle-class life and catching the fumes of some of that revolutionary energy, [but] just for his own sake.”
It is that limited perspective and selfishness that make so much of what’s funny in “The Mastermind” really funny, and what’s disheartening about Mooney so frustrating. But sending him running from the consequences of his own actions gives Reichardt and her collaborators the opportunity to do what they do best: Figure out movie-making while driving in a van.
“You know, I make a lot of image books for everybody to begin in a jumping off place, and they start introducing images and the walls are filled with images and everybody [sees them] — the hardest thing about COVID [was] people being separate and not being in a van together all the time. When you’re in a van together all the time, you talk about all these things and look at a place and talk about why it doesn’t work and what we would do with it if we did do it, and everybody is in that conversation, and it really is helpful,” Reichardt said.
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