The Mastermind: A Quiet Warning
by Emma Batterman
The Mastermind is not your typical heist film. Screened at the 61st Chicago International Film Festival, Josh O’Connor stars as James Blaine “JB” Mooney, an unemployed art school dropout banished to a monotonous small-town existence in 1970s Massachusetts. Tasked with caring for his two sons while his wife, Terri (Alana Haim), brings home the household income, JB is determined for something greater than his banal routine. He wrangles together a band of bumbling locals to rob a series of Arthur Dove paintings from his neighborhood art museum. Predictably, the underwhelming heist goes sideways. As the authorities encroach around him, JB relinquishes his familial duties and flees. The rest of the film features him hopping from place to place, latching onto the kindness of old friends as he hitchhikes his way towards Canada through the politically tumultuous climate of Nixon’s America.
Written, directed, and edited by Showing Up’s (2022) Kelly Reichardt, the film firmly plants itself in a quiet subversion of the heart-racing, action-packed sequences that permeate similar stories. O’Connor’s character is an embodiment of the white, middle-class masculine mundanity that envisions himself as nothing less than exceptional. The title perfectly encapsulates the suburbanite’s masculine hubris, the mastermind endowed with the gifts to strategize an Ocean’s 11 (1960) style escapade that elevates him above the drudging simplicity of fatherhood. In contrast to this archetype, Reichardt instead implements silence and all the loneliness it encompasses.
O’Connor’s central character is soft spoken, hunched in on himself despite his undeniable arrogance. His vanity lies in his vague, self-absorbed ambition for greatness rather than his perceived individual superiority. Even the heist he so painstakingly contrived unfolds in a frivolous disappointment, the only tension lying in the unpredictability of his co-conspirators. The only moments of any real trepidation come from the radio, the small television in the corner of the room, or the discarded newspaper that relay the violence surrounding the Vietnam War, both in the conflict and the mass demonstrations against it.
On the surface, Reichardt’s newest feature may not seem very political. If anything, every mention of the upheaval surrounding the war and the Nixon administration’s right-wing crackdown on student protests is buried under JB and his tribulations. It appears to follow a familiar cinematic formula in many Civil Rights period pieces that cram in a social justice arc just for it to eventually be sidelined in favor of the white protagonist (last year’s A Complete Unknown comes to mind). Reichardt seems to be aware of this chauvinistic trope, however, and systematically dissects it through a brilliantly subtle deconstruction of character. Through small gestures and a singular focus on JB, the writer-director lets the audience live in the subjective, prolonged silence of our haughty protagonist. As the radio is silenced and the television is shut off, we have no choice but to live in JB’s egocentric reality.
The turbulence of both the world around him and the harm he brought onto his family is second to his well-being. Only when his individualism is threatened does he confront the harsh truths of his ignorance, pulling the audience out of his self-absorbed reality. Like the title, Reichardt subverts our expectations through a comedy of errors entrenched in blind privilege. Immensely political up until its implosive final scene, The Mastermind delivers a simultaneously understated yet direct cautionary tale of white nescience and masculine ambition.