For three decades now, the director Kelly Reichardt has been making films about American escape artists: drifters and dreamers, rough sleepers and revolutionaries, full-of-it swindlers and disillusioned soldiers, plus more than a few ostensibly honest people caught up in the churn. When we first meet J.B. Mooney (Josh O’Connor) at the start of The Mastermind, he appears firmly in the latter category. A family man and a carpenter with a house in the Boston suburbs, J.B. seems merely to have fallen on hard times. It’s 1970, he’s unemployed, and the U.S. is preparing a ground invasion of Cambodia. Not that any of this seems to bother him much. Instead, he spends a lot of time at the Framingham Museum of Art, circling a gallery of abstract paintings by the American modernist Arthur Dove.
Yet as indicated by the title (and Rob Mazurek’s propulsive jazz score) J.B. has considerably more on his mind. The Mastermind is not Reichardt’s first heist caper—by my count, it’s her fourth—but it begins as her most direct. J.B. wants those Dove paintings, and after weeks spent casing the joint, he’s assembled a crack team to get them. Just kidding; we’re talking about a Kelly Reichardt film here. The heist itself is little more than a smash and grab, pulled off by a group of townie deadbeats, with an unwitting assist from J.B.’s wife Terri (Alana Haim), and unknowingly funded by his mother (Hope Davis). That it ends with all the paintings safely stored in his attic is false consolation. This is America; of course things don’t work out for the little guy.
