Fittingly, The Mastermind receives its release in the wake of a headline-grabbing heist at the Louvre. The criminals responsible for that robbery employed methods that suggest they're not students of French heist movies. There was no ingenious plan to break in through the roof or via an adjoining building under cover of darkness; instead the thieves went to work with angle grinders in broad daylight. Kelly Reichardt's film is inspired by a similar 1972 incident in which thieves entered the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts during opening hours and walked out with four valuable paintings.
Reichardt makes up a fictional set of characters and circumstances inspired by that robbery, but keeps the early '70s setting (with its beige palette and corduroy costuming, it's very much in the same '70s Massachusetts cinematic universe as Alexander Payne's The Holdovers). Josh O'Connor plays James, an unemployed art school dropout who hatches a plan to steal four Arthur Dove paintings from the museum. It's a terribly thought out plan, one that sees him team up with an unreliable trio of hoodlums. One thing after another goes wrong, though he does manage to acquire the paintings. That's when things really begin to go downhill for James, as he finds himself targeted by both the police and the local mob.
With The Mastermind, Reichardt seems to ask "What if Jean-Pierre Melville made a movie about a criminal who was terrible at crime?" Her movie employs Melville's methodical and meticulous approach to documenting the work of professional criminals, but this refined style is at odds with the unprofessional James, who is far from methodical and meticulous. It's as though James imagine himself the sophisticated hero of some classic French thriller, as if he's the villain of Man Bites Dog and has ordered the camera crew documenting his actions to do so in the style of Melville. This results in black comedy, as the stillness and distance of Reichardt's camera, and the length of her takes (the director also edited her own film) only reinforces how out of his depth and clueless James really is.
But the detached style and lack of traditional cutting also makes James' misadventures feel all the more realistic. It also greatly adds to the tension, and the sense that James needs to hurry the hell up. There's a wonderful scene in which James attempts to hide the paintings in the barn of a pig farm, and Reichardt allows the shot to linger so long that we begin to feel like his accomplices. It also involves a great punchline involving a ladder that further highlights his ineptitude.
The Mastermind also arrives at the same time as Derek Cianfrance's thievery tale Roofman, and it plays out how you imagine that film might if its criminal protagonist didn't have the advantage of possessing Channing Tatum's looks and charm. O'Connor brings a hangdog everyman quality to James, and as he has recently demonstrated with Challengers and La Chimera, he's very good at portraying narcissistic assholes. As unlikable as James is, the mechanics of Reichardt's filmmaking means we're always reluctantly rooting for him. She knows that decades of crime movies have trained us to leave our morals in the foyer when we buy a ticket for a crime thriller, and that we fall victim to a sort of Stockholm Syndrome when we watch such movies.
Like Roofman, The Mastermind removes the glamour from crime by highlighting the loneliness of the fugitive life. Unlike the loners found in the films of Melville, Michael Mann and Walter Hill, James needs people around him, first and foremost his family. We may find ourselves willing James to get away with his crime and evade capture, but for this man a solitary life on the run will likely be as punishing as one spent behind bars.
Directed by: Kelly Reichardt
Starring: Josh O'Connor, Alana Haim, John Magaro, Gaby Hoffman, Bill Camp, Hope Davis
