It seems like I’ve seen almost no marketing for The Mastermind, which is odd considering that I remember seeing the trailer for its director’s previous film, First Cow, approximately a thousand times (likely because it was released during the height of MoviePass). This does seem to be a personal experience, however, as every person to whom I mention Kelly Reichardt’s name has no idea what I’m talking about, even when I quote Toby Jones’s wistful “I taste London in this cake” line from the First Cow trailer (which, as stated before, I saw too many times to count). The little advertising that I have seen for The Mastermind led me to believe that this film would be a little more active than Reichardt’s other films have a reputation for being. When he wrote about Certain Women, Brandon noted that Reichardt’s films have “the impact of an encroaching tide, not a crashing tidal wave,” and that’s a succinct description of the way that her films creep up on you while she allows the camera to run long on every single action, which one wouldn’t think would pair well with a heist film. So, of course, that’s not exactly what this is. 

James Blaine “J.B.” Mooney (Josh O’Connor) is a feckless man, an art student who dropped out of school to become a carpenter, as much as one can “become a carpenter” if he’s chronically unemployed and relying on his wife (Alana Haim) as the sole breadwinner, with the occasional cash injection from his mother. J.B.’s father William (Bill Camp) is a judge of a certain stature who can’t fathom why J.B. has failed to become the success that his brother, who owns his own business, has. J.B.’s protestations that pushing around paperwork is a “stupid way to spend [one’s] time” fall as hollowly on his father’s ears as they do on ours. After he successfully manages to steal a small figurine from a display case at the Framingham Museum of Art, he hatches a plan to steal four Arthur Dove paintings from the same location. The heist itself goes off relatively easily despite some setbacks, but one of the men he hired reveals details about the theft when he’s apprehended while robbing a bank, and J.B. goes on the run, although that terminology is somewhat meaningless when we’re talking about a film with a pace like this. 

The Mastermind becomes a series of vignettes as J.B. interacts with interested parties, law enforcement, and old friends who have a variety of reactions to him showing up at their doorstep. Of particular note are the performances from Sterling and Jasper Thompson, who play the Mooney boys Carl and Tommy, respectively; they feel like the more down-to-earth versions of Ben Stiller’s Minis-Me in The Royal Tenenbaums, and both boys are pretty reliable sources of humor. From the film’s opening, Tommy plays an unknowing part in his father’s museum theft practice run, as his seemingly endless recitation of a stock logic puzzle, complete with starting and stopping as he corrects himself or forgets where he was going, and one can’t help but laugh. Tommy also ends up being in the car with his father when one of the thieves, Guy Hickey (Eli Gelb), lures him to meet with a few jovial gangsters, one of whom even gives J.B. some decent advice about how to be a better criminal in the future. Of course, J.B. doesn’t really accept any advice from anyone, or he wouldn’t have ended up in this situation. 

I’m curious to see how other people will react to the titular mastermind as a character as this film sees a wider release (if it does). It’s fascinating to watch Josh O’Connor play a role that’s so quietly despicable, and the fact that it’s him in the part makes you feel some measure of sympathy for J.B., despite him being objectively awful. He lies to his mother to get seed money to hire his heist associates under the guise of needing it to rent a space and tools for a carpentry project that will get him back into a good financial situation; he steals for no other reason than that he’s the worst kind of lazy person — one who will waste ten times the amount of energy needed to do something on avoiding doing that thing instead; and the last thing he does before the credits roll is rob an old lady (Amanda Plummer!) to get bus fare to continue his rambles. All around him are the signs of the anti-war protests of 1970, with every television set that appears in the film existing solely to provide more news about campus rebels and retaliatory police action. God-fearing American Patriots™ like his father (who criticizes the art thieves in front of J.B. for their having stolen modern art rather than something that he considers to be of value) surround J.B., and each time they appear they jab their fingers in the direction of  hippies and jeer, calling them cowardly and lazy for their pacifism, while the most cowardly, lazy degenerate one could imagine sits in their midst, the son of a judge, invisible. 

Haim isn’t given much to do in this one other than to quietly express disappointment at her husband from a distance; she’s a pair of feet on the stairs down to the basement where the heist is being planned, or she’s a blurred figure in the distance of the frame, arms folded. That’s somewhat to be expected, as the film is really O’Connor’s vehicle, but there are other characters who are quite a lot of fun. There’s a small group of teenage girls who hang in and around the museum, and two of them are held at gunpoint and give delightful interviews on TV later, and Gelb is very funny as the eternal failure Hickey. There’s a great sequence once J.B. is on the road where he ends up at the home of his now-married college friends Fred (John Magaro) and Maude (Gaby Hoffman) in which Fred is kind, friendly, and happy to see his friend, while Maude—who it’s implied may have had a thing with J.B. in the past—sees straight through all of the charm and “Aw, shucks” that O’Connor is bringing to the table. She’s the highlight of the film; I’ve never seen such great passive aggressive hospitality in the form of understatedly hostile egg frying, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. 

The Mastermind is kind of like Inside Llewyn Davis if it had a jazz soundtrack instead of being a folk musical. It’s also a bit of a look into what Tom Ripley would be like if he was all ideas and no follow-through; he even does a little bit of passport fakery, although we never get to see if he would have made it past border patrol. It’s not a tidal wave (if that’s what you’re looking for, what you seek is If I Had Legs I’d Kick You). It’s barely a current, but if you’re in the mood for something that’s decompressed, there are worse choices to be made.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond