The latest film from a great American minimalist arrives amid headlines about one of the most puzzling heists in recent history. For decades, we have been told such thieves – the Einsteins of high larceny – construct the most elaborate schemes to thwart intricate security. They don’t just back a ladder up to the Louvre in broad daylight and set to work with angle grinders. Right?
At the time of writing, it still looks as if those thieves may have been cunning in their brute simplicity. In contrast, as The Mastermind progresses, we are increasingly assured the titular plotter is every bit as misguided as he at first seems.
Given grumpy energy by Josh O’Connor, James Blaine Mooney is married with two children, but still feels the need to cadge off forever-sighing parents (Bill Camp and Hope Davis). It is 1970 in Massachusetts and rickety generation gaps have opened up.
Few will fail to sympathise with Mom as she wearily passes over wads of money to support the harebrained scheme he has invented to cover his actual plans to rob several modern masterpieces from the local museum. The plot is less bravura than the Louvre heist, but every bit as bold. They are essentially going to walk in – maybe wearing stocking masks – and cart the paintings back to their getaway car.
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The picture echoes the low-key rhythms of those films in cinemas as the action takes place. It was no accident that Kelly Reichardt’s Night Moves, from 2013, shared its title with a famously ambiguous 1975 Arthur Penn flick. Like those movies, The Mastermind makes little effort to win us over to any character. Not only is James a scatterbrained fellow who can’t be trusted to mind his own kids for an afternoon, he is not even a particularly effective criminal. Among the film’s unanswered mysteries is how he can exact even this degree of surly loyalty from even this class of hopeless collaborator.
No big thing goes wrong. Just plenty of medium-sized things. One of the team drops out and is replaced by a more professional crook in the person of Ronnie Gibson (Javion Allen). The whole scheme, conceived to get James out of an under-achieving hole, only serves to confirm how he got there in the first place. Here is a man who can only think two moves in advance, something apparent when the time comes to dispose of the loot.
Not for the first time, a Reichardt film has travelled a sine wave following its premiere. The film was very well received at Cannes in May, but, on US release, has already puzzled (maybe “appalled” is a better word) mainstream punters expecting a clatter of violence and mayhem. As ever with this filmmaker, the action plays out at a leisurely pace, nudged gently along by the most internal of performances. Christopher Blauvelt’s dun and damp cinematography is counterpointed by a mordant jazz score from Rob Mazurek. This is a cinema of introversion, concealment and evasion. Nothing is given up easily.
O’Connor here confirms his status as one of the era’s great new enigmas. He will soon offer further deflections in the tonally adjacent History of Sound and, as lead, in the considerably more mainstream Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery. The turn here is, however, by far the most interesting.
At first he – like the film, for that matter – seems little more than a transient vapour, impossible to grasp, but, as events progress, the action rubs up against the changes engulfing America. While James is huddled away with family, the political convulsions are little more than filler between the advertisements on TV. As other fugitives would then discover, there is no such protection when one was cast to the unforgiving winds. A film that grows on you.
