Kelly Reichardt’s ‘The Mastermind’ Nails the Folly of Male Entitlement

The Mastermind, a masterful story of an unmindful mess-up, is a droll drama about a guy who steals paintings to fuel his big dreams of easy money. But there’s nothing big or easy about this damning movie portrait, which uses heist genre tropes for a more probing dissection of a deeply unimpressive man who acts like life owes him more. Kelly Reichardt presents a bemused look at the male id in all its feckless, arrogant, entitled glory.

James Blaine Mooney (Josh O’Connor) is the titular mastermind, a sad-sack husband in 1970 Massachusetts who would rather fester in modestly comfortable idleness than go out and make a decent wage. He leaves that to his put-upon wife Terri (Alana Haim), whose quotidian desk job makes her the de facto bread winner in the family. James quietly ignores their two children Carl (Sterling Thompson) and Tommy (Jasper Thompson) — good-natured little boys with feral energy — while Terri properly mothers them. “Why can’t they be with you?” Terri says when James calls her at work and says they unexpectedly don’t have school one day. “I got things to do,” he replies. “What things?” she replies. “Like…what?”

Like robbing a museum. Or, more specifically, getting people to rob it for him. The local Framingham Museum of Art is home to a series of paintings by American abstract artist Arthur Dove, and James wants to steal four of them, hide them away, and sell them at a later date. It’s a fool-proof plan, but only for smaller fools than Dove can hire. James thinks he’s being clever by paying a few people to do the heist for him, as long as he provides index card renderings of the paintings for them to memorize and the women’s hosiery to put over the heads.

Mastermind ★★★★★ (5/5 stars)
Directed by: Kelly Reichardt
Written by: Kelly Reichardt
Starring: Josh O’Connor, Alana Haim, Hope Davis, John Magaro, Gaby Hoffman, Bill Camp
Running time: 110 mins

The amateur thieves quickly show their mettle. The man hired to drive the hot getaway car and dispose of it, bolts as soon as he drops it off with James — which means the mastermind himself will have to do the job. And one of the remaining guys, a loose cannon who unexpectedly brings a gun with him, waves his weapon around with glee and attacks a security guard. Their broad-daylight bravado is sloppy, they threaten a teenage girl, and their escape is slowed by having to hand-crack the back window of their station wagon before loading it up with the paintings.

Remarkably, James and his irregulars pull off the initial robbery. But soon the cops get wise before wise guys get wiser. And once thugs are in the mix, James’ scheme goes sideway so quickly that he has to go on the lam.

None of this, of course, would have happened if James had any sense of integrity. Here is a man who has options, whose father is a well-regarded judge, whose mother is a society woman, whose family has money. James, a talented woodworker and art school graduate, is neither unskilled or nor uneducated. He just doesn’t want to have an honest job or build an honest career. He’s a bitter preppy sloth, in his crewneck sweaters and plaid oxford shirts, reeking of quiet desperation and surrounded by loved ones who strain to love him.

Reichardt’s damning portrait, quietly wry and studiously understated in its construction, is the rare entry in her filmography of humble lives that almost entirely focuses on a single man — one who is affluent, no less, with misguided dreams of grandeur. Her film is an empathetic look at a contemptible life, a consideration of unearned ambition and the many ways it festers, leading inevitably to a tragic climax that’s brilliantly cartoonish — a man with no convictions surrounded by honest, kind, principled people.

One of the funniest moments is an extended scene when, one late night, James strains to hide the art in a remote barn. He slowly removes each carefully wrapped painting from a bespoke wooden box he built, climbs up a ladder to the hayloft, hauls the box up there, and slowly inserts each painting into the box again before sliding the removable lid back into place. He’s filthy, exhausted, and even accidentally knocks the ladder off the ledge, forcing him to dangle and fall to the ground. The whole thing is a laborious mess. But that wooden box he made with his own hands? Handsomely designed and perfectly crafted. Impeccable.