The opening credits of Kelly Reichardt’s “The Mastermind” feature a driving, percussive score from jazz musician Rob Mazurka. It’s busy, it’s loud, and it’s set to the backdrop of … suburban Massachusetts.
More specifically, it plays over fall in suburban Massachusetts in the 1970s. Vibrant colors, brick buildings, and a soft, ethereal beauty that doesn’t quite match up with the explosiveness of Mazurka’s score – after all, the Framingham Art Museum doesn’t necessarily scream avant-garde jazz. That disconnect, however, is the same one that lives inside the film’s protagonist: big, messy, and stuck in the suburbs.
This opening credits sequence sets up the core tension of “The Mastermind,” a film that both expands Reichardt’s purview and plays into her greatest strengths as a filmmaker. “The Mastermind” is one of her funnier films to date, and possibly her most commercial. It follows James Blaine “JB” Mooney (Josh O’Connor), a husband and father of two moonlighting as an art thief – well, if one can moonlight as anything if they don’t have a job to begin with. Reichardt often makes movies about the down-and-out, but JB is a special kind of ineffectual she doesn’t often dabble in; the Reichardt character most likely to make you shake your head and go, “This f*ckin’ guy” since Stephen Meek in “Meek’s Cutoff.”
But, while “The Mastermind” has its humor and a certain kinetic energy to it that Reichardt pictures usually don’t, it’s still got her signature all over it. “The Mastermind” is exploring the same things Reichardt has always been interested in – the psyche of a uniquely American person at any given moment in time, discontent with their life but unsure of what it is they want. O’Connor proves to be a worthy muse, perfectly embodying what it looks like when apathy is no longer enough.
JB is an art school drop out, one of millions of Americans who just can’t seem to “figure it out.” He and his family, including his wife Terri (Alana Haim), have dinner once a week at his parents’ house, where his father (Bill Camp) continuously berates him for not having “figured it out,” especially when everyone else around him has. JB takes this abuse from his father with a deadened look in his eye, insisting he’s not good enough at whatever it is his father wishes he would invest in – in this case, furniture making – to make an honest living.
JB could be lying about this; he lies about a lot of things. He asks his mom (Hope Davis) for money and then lies to her about what it’s for. He lies to his wife about why he can’t watch the kids on their day off from school. He’s content to lie, confident in the fact that the art heist he’s planning will go off without a hitch, and everything will be just fine.
During the opening moments of “The Mastermind,” it would be easy to mistake JB as smart. He’s sneaky, that much is sure – as the museum guard loudly snores from his post, JB steals a little figurine out of an exhibit box. Later, he loudly drops his keys on the ground in front of the guard, testing to see if he’ll wake up (he doesn’t).
But, for as meticulous as Reichardt’s filmmaking is here, don’t mistake that attention to detail as belonging to JB as well. He’s just smart enough to realize that no one expects the Framingham Art Museum to get robbed, but not smart enough to account for all factors. During the actual heist – during which that guard is still asleep – JB’s two accomplices walk into the museum with pantyhose over their heads in broad daylight. One woman sees them taking an Arthur Dove painting off the wall, assumes they’re cleaning the room, and walks away. This is a sleepy town, and yet the heist still quickly goes sideways. JB might be the mastermind, but he’s not a very good one.
In those early moments, Reichardt happily plays into JB’s ineptitude and narcissism. His attempt to hide the paintings begins with him accidentally kicking over the ladder he needs to get down from his hiding spot and ends with him letting slip to the cops that his father is a judge so that they leave him alone. But, as funny as these small moments are, Reichardt allows “The Mastermind” to walk the line of humor and melancholy so that the movie becomes the type of thoughtful character study she does so well.
Outside of Reichardt’s own filmography, the film that “The Mastermind” most evokes is the Coen Brothers’ “Inside Llewyn Davis. “The Mastermind” is perhaps slightly more acerbic in its opinion of its protagonist than that film, although still tinged with Reichardt’s empathetic touch. JB is, more or less, a jerk – emotionally stunted, quick to tell a lie, and adrift in a world that’s rapidly changing. You get the sense that he’s always been able to skate by on a modicum of charm, but “The Mastermind” captures him at a time when life is catching up with him. If the people around him didn’t smell his bull before, they surely are starting to now. In the scene where Terri finds out about the heist, she sits dead-eyed on the bed while JB prattles on about how it’s okay if she’s freaking out – in fact, he wants her to freak out – but she has to have a little faith in him. Her slack stare is her coming to terms with the fact that this is who she married – and she’s sort of always known that.
JB is lost in a world of his own making, always convinced that the next trick will be the one that changes everything, constantly searching and never finding. It doesn’t help that the world catching up to JB is more opinionated than ever. The specter of the Vietnam War is everywhere in “The Mastermind,” from “I Want You” posters to newscasts that play out their misery in JB’s periphery. When his friend Fred (John Magaro, the warmest presence in the film) suggests he head up to a commune in Canada full of draft dodgers and radical feminists (“Nice people,” Fred says), JB opines that that’s not really his scene. On a bus, JB notices a soldier sitting with his wife and child before he falls asleep. When he wakes up, the soldier is gone, leaving the baby and the woman, crying, alone.
None of this seems to move JB – not soldiers coming home, not mothers marching against the war – as much as the idea of his own fulfillment. But he continues to look for that fulfillment in all the wrong places, fundamentally disconnected from the world around him, content in his unhappiness until the very end.