One of the joys of reviewing movies is witnessing a longtime filmmaker’s artistic breakthrough, as has happened with Kelly Reichardt. A serious director with a principled world view, she formerly eschewed style and flair as if they were sins, narrowing her aesthetic to fit the points of view that she conveyed in each film. But with “Showing Up,” from 2022, she displayed, for the first time, uninhibited cinematic pleasure, an unabashed delight in inventive observation and gratuitous beauty. This may be no coincidence, given that the movie is about two artists—one working small and exquisite, the other working big and flamboyant—and it gives both their avid due. Now with a new film, “The Mastermind,” Reichardt goes drastically further in many dimensions—dramatic, aesthetic, geographical, historical, ethical. It’s one of the freest genre reimaginings and even one of the most subtly distinctive unhingings of movie narrative that I’ve seen in a while. What’s more, the gratuitous is its very subject.
“The Mastermind” is another art-world story—sort of. It’s set in 1970, mainly in Framingham, Massachusetts, where James Blaine Mooney (Josh O’Connor), called J.B., is an artisan manqué—a cabinetmaker who’s out of work and whose lofty sense of his own craft may be the reason why. He lives with his wife, Terri (Alana Haim), the family breadwinner, who works behind a typewriter in an office, and their two idiosyncratic sons, seemingly just either side of ten, Tommy (Jasper Thompson) and Carl (Sterling Thompson). One day, while the family is visiting the (fictional) Framingham Museum of Art, J.B. finds employment for his idle hands. Catching a guard asleep, he opens a display case and purloins a figurine, extracting it in an eyeglasses case that he slips into Terri’s handbag.
Then, with time to kill and energy to burn, J.B. recruits a few friends—the moppy-haired and laid-back Guy (Eli Gelb), the tense and blunt Larry (Cole Doman), and the impulsive Ronnie (Javion Allen)—to steal paintings from the museum. Even before the thieves cross the building’s threshold, “The Mastermind” emerges as an instant heist classic. Reichardt’s granular view of the plot, clearly bound for disaster, is both terribly sad and absurdly funny. Terri sews big cloth bags to fit the paintings, and J.B. flaunts his woodworking skills to craft a partitioned box in which to store the loot. Larry steals a car for the getaway; Guy parks another one to give pursuers the slip; J.B. peeks behind a painting to see how it hangs and, to instruct his crew on which paintings to snatch, makes drawings of them that betray a skill being sadly misused. Reichardt’s fanatical attention to the details of art theft conveys sincere fascination shadowed with the grim foreboding implicit in J.B.’s effort to anticipate what could go wrong.
Good luck with that. Reichardt also revels in the antics of things going awry: a locked car door can’t be opened; a schoolgirl (Margot Anderson-Song) with a beret shows up in the museum during the robbery and declaims in French from a classic play; a parking lot becomes a banal nightmare of obstacles and surveillance; eventually the thieves even encounter the menace of what might be called a rival faction. As the heist’s meticulous preparations give way to chaotic improvisation, Reichardt’s awareness of the radical contingency of concerted action—a notion that is, in its way, intrinsically political—far outstrips Paul Thomas Anderson’s attention to a revolutionary cell’s plans and risks in “One Battle After Another.”
The movie’s action scenes are built atop a peculiar and original social foundation. As the son of a notable local family, J.B. is a disappointment to his father, Bill (Bill Camp), and a bewilderment—albeit an adored one—to his mother, Sarah (Hope Davis). Their status affords him significant advantages, which play surprisingly large roles in the story. Here, too, Reichardt carefully weaves a web of connection and causality that yields a range of results—some well planned, others wickedly ironic—and which I wouldn’t dare disclose.
“The Mastermind” delivers so many narrative surprises that, in discussing it, I’m unusually wary of spoilers. It offers the pleasures of being caught off guard both by major twists and by minor details whose startling originality merits discussion but that viewers should be allowed to discover unprepared. A heist unfolds in three acts—planning, execution, and evasion—and, in “The Mastermind,” each of the three is arrestingly singular in mood and manner, with outcomes that are surprising in both practical and affective aspects. The most responsible way to communicate the delight is to share a few details but leapfrog over their place in the plot and head straight to the mighty conceit that connects them. One of Reichardt’s greatest inspirations is to create a texture of political conflict involving the Vietnam War and its manifestations in American society—news reports, marches and protests, voices of reaction, police repression—and to integrate into the story as inescapable elements of daily life.
