The film “The Mastermind” tells the story of an art heist as a restless, irreversible failure

A young man plans an art heist and, as the film title suggests, he is a genius. “The Mastermind” actually begins with images that begin to convey criminal competence, even if only on a small scale.

James Blaine “JB” Mooney tests the security conditions on a family trip to the local museum in a small town in Massachusetts and nimbly steals a small, probably not very valuable figurine from a display case. After about 15 minutes of the film, however, it becomes clear that the title is ironic, and the man would have been kicked out of the gang immediately in “Ocean’s Eleven” and every other US heist movie of the last hundred years.

In addition, “The Mastermind” introduces its actual main character in the first few minutes: the setting. The art heist takes place in 1970, and director Kelly Reichardt and her set designer Anthony Gasparro, who has been building Reichardt’s sets since “Certain Women” (2016), have created a world in earthy brown tones that feels authentic – from home furnishings to corduroy jackets.

Contemporary image of the USA

In its final act, after everything has gone wrong, “The Mastermind” makes it completely clear that the decade is not just decoration for its own sake, but that the director is interested in creating a contemporary image of the USA. Your film begins with the theft of American still lifes and ends with police violence at an anti-Vietnam War demonstration.

But from beginning to end there is constant failure. JB Mooney is a carpenter and former art student who seems to exist in quiet anger at the discrepancy between his unglamorous life and his absolute desire to make a lot of money with little effort. Mooney joins the ensemble of slacker characters that populate the work of independent filmmaker Kelly Reichardt. People who exist in the gaps and on the edges – but not with the glamor of convinced outsiders, but because they can’t do anything else.

The heart that these films have for their characters, who are neither heroes nor anti-heroes, but rather sit out the myth of the hero, so to speak, is great. JB Mooney, however, is the first to come across as a latent, helpless unlikeable person. Josh O’Connor (“Challengers,” “The Crown”) plays the hapless art thief with hunched shoulders and a once again strong physical presence.

Want and reality are incompatible

The frustrating incompatibility of desire and reality manifests itself in physical expression. And the equally pronounced vanity is the driving force behind self-blindness and thoughtlessness. Mooney stumbles from one sausage-filled fuck-up to the next, and the moments in which O’Connor allows subtly menacing moments of self-awareness to appear on his character’s face increase the further she strays.

The plan to steal a handful of paintings by artist Arthur Dove is carelessly put together. JB Mooney hires a couple of wannabe gangsters, they put fishnet stockings over their heads, take the pictures off the wall and run back to the car. An unreal undertaking, but based on a real art theft in 1972 at the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts. In reality there was at least enough for two Gauguins, a Picasso and a Rembrandt.

JB Mooney has become obsessed with the idea of ​​stealing Arthur Dove’s paintings. His father, who, to make matters worse, is also a former judge, is correspondingly unimpressed and asks himself at the dinner table what all this nonsense is about – unaware that the thief is sitting at the dinner table: “It’s hard to imagine that all the effort for these abstract pictures is worth it.”

Silent Comedy

He doesn’t either. But the effort itself is completely silent comedy. The robbery scene is in the middle of the film. The art thieves are of course discovered, of course if you take paintings off the wall in a museum in the middle of the day.

However, not by the security guard who is sleeping, but by a young girl who walks around the museum rooms and describes the works of art on display in affected French: “ennuyeux”, “dépravé”, “factice”. The montage at least suggests the idea that a character is talking about the genre that is being gently undermined at this moment using the means of outsider cinema.

The art thieves manage to get the pictures into the trunk with a bang. After that, things go completely downhill: JB Mooney gets into trouble with the local mafiosi, and the second half of the film shows the mastermind on an aimlessly meandering, action-free escape through the USA in the 1970s. A journey through the area that seems aimless in Reichardt’s films.

Wanting to get away from something

Even if the characters, like in “Old Joy” or “Meek’s Cutoff,” have a goal or, like here, want to get away from something. The direction that life should take is not clear either in front of or on the screen, and the usual cinematic narrative conventions are accordingly perforated, which always presuppose that the people being told about go through a describable development and thus a story.

In “The Mastermind” these conventions are crossed out and an initially irritating dynamic arises, as always in this work, which radically slows down the usual speeds and rhythms of the genres to which it refers (the road movie in “Old Joy” and “Wendy and Lucy”, the western in “Meek’s Cutoff” and “First Cow”, the political thriller in “Night Moves”).

The narrative curdles, so to speak. The mastermind drives aimlessly through the countryside, talks on the phone to his disappointed wife (Alana Haim), but is mostly worried about himself. The figure becomes more and more silent, the big mouth becomes quiet. And where previously a heist plot provided the structure – planning, execution, consequences – there is now only a static state to be seen, which is carefully depicted: restless, irreversible failure.

Brittle immobility

This alleged immobility makes Kelly Reichardt’s films seem very brittle at first impression. But if you accept this immobility, you enter a space of contemplation and calm concentration.

“The Mastermind” is a film of the smallest gestures, and Kelly Reichardt is one of the most subtle filmmakers currently working. The important things happen in the gaps, and here again you see a lot of idleness, activities that are not actually considered worth telling in genre cinema, and waiting.

And in the case of “The Mastermind” all of this happens in slow motion from the last third of the film at the latest. Reichardt avoids the mannerisms of slow cinema. The slowness of these images is not an end in itself and actually not even a stylistic device, but rather a prerequisite for making what is supposed to be shown appear.

Reichardt’s stories happen on the margins, not in subcultures that are heroic in their opposition, but where hapless average people try to squeeze happiness out of life and the society in which they have to live. Behind the calm surface of these films there is something like a realistic tragedy that is not exaggerated by any entertaining drama. Or a tragic realism.