Jauntier than any of Kelly Reichardt’s previous work, “The Mastermind” packs an ironic punch. That the title need not be taken literally becomes clear right from the start, of course; that the film’s shaggy-dog tone belies something far-sadder and more allegorical takes a bit longer to set-in. Closing out the Cannes competition with a throwback crime caper set to a jazz-beat, “The Mastermind” also gives the minimalist filmmaker a new world to etch out in fine detail, sending us back to 1970 with a very millennial guide.
JB Mooney (Josh O’Connor) is what we would call a failson. Married, with his own pair of precocious boys, this art-school-dropout turned-of-work-carpenter (in both instances more by than choice than misfortune) gets by on his family name and money. Not that either go particularly far – his dad (Bill Camp) is just a small-town judge in Framingham, MA, while his wife (Alana Haim) doesn’t seem particularly well-compensated to be her household’s sole breadwinner. That both characters are best defined by their beneficial relationship to our mastermind might tell you something about old JB.
But he does have a kind of easy-going charm, and that’s enough to rope a couple of his bros into a life-changing heist – provided he can cover incidentals with a loan from Mom (Hope Davis). The hit: The local museum. The loot: Four Arthur Dove abstracts. The plan: Airtight, but he’ll fill you in on a need to know basis. Of course, once the scheme plays out onscreen we can’t help but laugh – turns out, no one had ever thought of walking in, lifting each painting off the wall, and then walking out.
“The Mastermind” draws a lot of such laughs as it continually undercuts JB’s grand pronouncements with his zero-effort follow through. Turning low-stakes into a winning hand, the film plays games of set-up-and-payoff, leaving viewers in the dark as to JB’s next step, only with the growing awareness that the answer will be more harebrained than expected. And Reichardt has great fun with this irony, offsetting the on-screen doofus-ry against an urbane jazz score that might as well be coming right from JB’s head – he no doubt saw “Elevator to the Gallows,” and probably owns the LP.
Would it shock you to learn that this plan was not, in fact, airtight? Would you be surprised that our mastermind heads out on the lam with the same nonchalance? Would you use your fugitive head-start as a chance to catch up with friends from college, played by John Magaro and Gaby Hoffmann? Well then, consider yourself lucky you’re not JB.
The laughs eventually recede as the hunt continues, with “The Mastermind” taking on faint echoes of Reichardt’s 2008 film “Wendy and Lucy.” Both follow a life as it quietly unravels, subtracting foundations, as in a game of Jenga, until the whole edifice comes down. Only the filmmaker’s political point couldn’t be more different: While the character played by Michelle Williams began the earlier film as downwardly mobile, our JB falls from a much higher perch.
Here Reichardt works with a heavier-hand, filling each period-appropriate set with enough anti-war leaflets and effigies of Tricky Dick to supply one hundred protests, while scoring a pivotal sequence with news reports from the front once the music finally falls silent. One needn’t squint to recognize a certain allegorical import when following an all-American mastermind bumbling through his own undoing with the casual assurance that everything will eventually work itself out, because everything always has. But if you do get lost, “The Mastermind” will gladly hold your hand. All of which makes Reichardt’s latest something of a mixed-bag. The director has great fun closing the gap between her own work and that of films of Hal Ashby and Robert Altman, all while somehow losing her otherwise deft ability to dramatize political topics in the most natural of ways. Isn’t it ironic?