Review: The Mastermind

Director:  Kelly Reichardt

Stars:  Josh O’Connor, Alana Haim, Gaby Hoffman

Imagine taking a polaroid. The exposed image slowly reveals itself, colours bleeding in, gradually brightening. Until it crystalises into certainty. Until it’s there. Now, like the opening of Christopher Nolan’s Memento, imagine reversing that conjured image. The subject slowly going away, dispersing, disappearing. That’s a lot like how Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind plays. An initially certain, comfortable and locatable portrait of a character fixed within a genre, but whose definitions – through his own actions – start incrementally fading away. Just as Josh O’Connor’s art thief James schemes to lift four abstract painting from a provincial gallery, so he is lifted from his own life. The mastermind of his own destruction.

Reichardt’s movies do often feel like polaroid photographs. They’re earthen, tactile, homely, nostalgic but not overtly sentimental. Like the kiln fired pottery of her last protagonist Lizzy from Showing Up one has the urge to reach out and touch them. To feel their evident textures. The Mastermind is no different in this regard. Leaving the familiarity of her usual Oregon settings, Reichardt takes us to Massachusetts and the early 1970s for her most spirited flick since her 1994 debut River of Grass, which it resembles in certain ways. Like that film there’s a sense here that life will be invigorated by the risk and romance of crime, but also that the country’s love affair with the outlaw is a mirage, as oft-unattainable as the so-called American Dream. Against the backdrop of Vietnam protests, The Mastermind‘s setting is not immaterial, positioning this story at a volatile point in America’s recent history through which many of the post-war ideals started to crumble.

O’Connor’s James can be a bit of a tough read, but there are subtleties to the writing and performance that speak volumes once caught. With his wife Terri (Alana Haim) and their two boys Carl (Sterling Thompson) and Tommy (Jasper Thompson), he has the nuclear family that the ’50s so prized. He comes from a privileged background; his father William (Bill Camp) is an esteemed local judge, and his concerned mother Sarah (Hope Davis) is a reluctant soft touch, on-hand with her checkbook when James makes moon eyes in her direction.

What moves him to detonate this life? Is it just financial gain? The picture muddies these waters with other potential motives. The opening sees James daringly steal a wood figurine ahead of the heist – maybe even before it’s occurred to him – with the snoozing guard in plain sight, indicating that the thrill and mystique might be its own reward. Much later in the picture, an inquisitive line from reluctant friend Maude (Gaby Hoffman) suggests a far more complex history, both with these particular paintings and in the context of James’ perceived failures. It’s all so juicily suggestive.

What plays out is a film of two halves. The first is an appreciably scruffy small-town crime caper. Reichardt peppers the escapades of James and his disastrous accomplices with comedic hiccups and misadventures, and even plays in the sandbox of Hitchcockian genre staples (the unwitting cop whose very presence escalates the stakes and the tension). With rich period detailing in the cars and costumes, it’s a pleasure to follow, underpinned with a suitably playful and scuffling score from Rob Mazurek.

After the fun is over, however, is when The Mastermind becomes arguably more inscrutable and interesting. It’s a little like a deeper exploration of the end portion of Reichardt’s superb eco-thriller Night Moves, which sees Jesse Eisenberg’s environmental terrorist Josh ejected from his own life, stuck outside of the system with no fixed address. As James’ scheme (inevitably) comes undone, he finds himself on the lam. Bit by bit the things that defined him are stripped away. Family, friends, money and, eventually, moral rectitude. Another crime bookends the picture, but this one is filled with desperation and shame, quite the opposite of the complacent theft that sets all this in motion. There’s something Bressonian about this steady depiction of a person losing. Chantal Akerman seems like a bit of an influence, too. From a 360 degree pan redolent of her short La Chambre to a final shot that feels plucked right out of News from Home (if Cincinnati had been her muse instead of New York).

But this is all Reichardt. Working again with Christopher Blauvelt (her regular DP since Certain Women) she has crafted one of the year’s most handsome films, one that lightly evokes the Americana of old Bob Dylan album covers (helped along by James’ ramshackle fashion choices). The more contemplative second half takes on the appearance of a wistful autumnal road movie, with James lost in the midway places. Boarding houses and bus stations. The drifter’s America as romanticised by Kerouac. But James’ journey is a sad and lonely one. O’Connor nails the interiority of this. It’s a quiet fade out, even if the end comes pitted with some rowdy comedic punches. His baring and demeanour expresses the melancholy. We might miss the funny energy of the first half of the picture, but so does he.

Reichardt movies all need time to settle, and the first flush is rarely when their richest charms reveal themselves. The Mastermind is like this too, I feel, although it offers more immediate gems than some of her more studied and stationary films. With – to this viewer’s mind – as many as five masterpieces under her belt already, time will tell where this effort fits into the overarching project of her work. What starts out feeling like a concerted effort to do something more lively and playful becomes as reflective and introverted as anything she’s done. Even at it’s end, however, there’s a sense of humour Buster Keaton would have been proud of. Reichardt might’ve pulled a heist on us; making us think she’s cruising in the realms of mild comedy when she’s really handing over a complex rumination on American identity made timely by the ways history seems doomed to repeat itself.