In her 1970 essay “On the Morning After the Sixties,” Joan Didion described her disillusionment with the idea that political protest could “affect man’s fate in the slightest.” It’s an opinion James Blaine “J.B.” Mooney might share, if he were paying attention. He’s the lead character and hapless art thief in director Kelly Reichardt’s new film The Mastermind, set in 1970. Played with tousled charisma by Brit du jour Josh O’Connor, J.B. is a dubiously unemployed carpenter who opts to rob a small New England art museum. While political unrest churns across the country, J.B.’s tuned out.
At Cinema 21’s after-screening Q&A with Reichardt earlier this month, the director explained J.B.'s political apathy as intentional. “He’s a little too old to have to worry about the draft,” she explained. “He’s insulated from a lot of the turmoil that's going on in the broader world.” That insulation dissolves over time, and The Mastermind’s political backdrop becomes a key aspect of its mise-en-scène. Reactions to the Vietnam War and the Kent State shootings flicker through café windows, televisions, and in overheard conversations. These notes build to a cacophony in the film’s final scene. J.B., like anyone, can only avoid the outside world for so long.
The Mastermind balances that rising political noise with a strikingly tranquil visual world. The film's earthy, faded setting—shot on 16mm—unfolds in reddish orange and gold, leaves shifting beneath the fall light. The viewer sees newspapers, sprawling ranch homes, and extras in sport coats and polyester dresses. Streets are lined with Pepsi signs and waterbed advertisements; peace activists with sideburns occasionally crowd the sidewalks. The Mastermind's subtle attention to detail, somehow both muted and precise, feels quintessentially Reichardt.
At the fictional Framingham Museum of Art—about 20 miles west of the very real Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, site of the largest unsolved art heist in history—a drowsy security guard mans the galleries. There, one autumn afternoon, J.B. tucks a small figurine into his eyeglass case.
Art heists—on film, at least—feel a little romantic, their perpetrators effortlessly chic, if obviously flawed. But J.B. quickly sheds any of that smooth-criminal stylishness. Around the corner from the vitrine he’s just opened, his wife Terri (Alana Haim) watches their young sons, Carl and Tommy. The boys yammer to themselves. Suddenly, J.B.'s beard seems scruffier, his sweater rumpled. He’s just a normal dude, married with kids. So, why steal art? Can’t J.B. just get a J-O-B?
“Hey dad, where do otters come from?” one of the boys asks as the family exits the museum.
It’s soon revealed that J.B. has a far bigger art heist planned. With the help of some equally misguided accomplices, he’ll steal four paintings by Arthur Dove, an American abstractionist and slightly obscure figure of the era. (“It's a point of pride for [J.B.],” the actor told NPR. “He's not stealing Picassos... He's stealing Arthur Doves. There's a sort of ego there… I'll steal the artists that only real artists know about.”) Around the 20-minute mark, the heist—pantyhose over heads, paintings stuffed in pillowcases, a gun flashed—unfolds in broad daylight. It’s almost easy.
These days, of course, the museum would be surrounded by cameras. Digital artists had to “paint those out,” Reichardt explained during the Q&A. But even with a lack of surveillance working in his favor, J.B. still can’t pull off a crime like this. Things fall apart. Detectives come knocking. He gets out of town, shuttling the kids and Terri off to his parents’ place.
Dropping in on old friends Fred and Maude (John Magaro and Gaby Hoffmann), J.B. selfishly implicates the couple by proximity. Still, Fred offers J.B. some interesting advice: There’s a commune across the border. “Draft dodgers, radical feminists, dope fiends—nice people,” he jokes. It’s the kind of statement that would signal foreshadowing if Reichardt weren’t always imagining what a character would really do. J.B. doesn’t flee to the Canadian commune.
Instead, broke and stranded in Cincinnati, he grows more desperate. As he attempts to blend into a procession of war protestors, it becomes clear that the outside world is finally catching up to him. “Everything I’ve done has been for you, Terri. And the kids. And yeah, me too,” he tells his wife on the phone. Only those last words ring true.
Still, J.B.’s not a villain in the traditional sense. He’s moreso testing out the role, from a position of privilege and cluelessness. Terri works and raises the kids; his mom slips him cash; his father, an esteemed judge, maintains the family name. J.B. embodies a familiar failson drift that smirks and skirts apologies. He’s reminiscent of the stubbled, lanky Elliott Gould in Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye, his character shambling through the ’70s.
“Everyone's kind of a mess. People are still fucking up. I think these kinds of characters reflect back what the world, or the country, is asking of people, too,” said Reichardt of her penchant for unmoored characters. “I like little power structures. I like small politics.”
These “small politics” define The Mastermind as much as the wider political atmosphere humming in its background. They’re what makes the film feel like classic Reichardt. Her long, disquieting takes simmer and fade; silence lingers between characters; the humor’s as dry as those crunchy autumn leaves.
At Cinema 21, an audience member asked Reichardt whether artists have the responsibility to “confront the times.” She thought about it. “I’m not a political filmmaker. I’m not, like, trying to make a statement about anything. I’m just doing my thing,” she answered.
Reichardt’s “thing” mirrors J.B.’s, but inverted. “I try to forget about the world and just get into my little world,” she said. The difference is in what they use their little worlds for. Reichardt builds hers to look at life more closely. J.B. builds his to avoid life entirely.
The Mastermind is screening at at PAM CUT’s Tomorrow Theater on Sat Dec 20, 110 minutes, rated R.
