Few minds could be less masterly, you might think, than the stoner sponge between the ears of J.B. (Josh O’Connor), who, in Kelly Reichardt‘s Cannes-closer The Mastermind, conceives a plan to steal four paintings from the art gallery that is the chief weekend haunt for his family. As his two sons run around its Civil War display, throwing paper darts and speculating on why otters exist, J.B. slips away to the room of paintings by Arthur Dove, an early abstractionist, checks out how they’re attached to the wall and pictures his future winnings. All he needs are a getaway car, a couple of accomplices to do the actual robbing — he can’t do it himself, being a gallery habitué recognized by security guards, should they happen to be awake — and, whoopee, they’re in the money.
Reichardt, who has carved out an indie niche with her brand of low-key, low-fi Americana, here jumps into the comedy corner of the heist genre that is entirely about failure. It’s set in 1970, before CCTV cameras, mobile phones or even centrally locking cars, which means nothing electronic can disrupt the delightfully uncomplicated conception of a daylight robbery committed by men wearing stockings on their heads. The getaway vehicle is a great big gas-guzzling tank that struggles to make turns tight enough to get out of the car park. Even so, they get away. The theft is on the news that night. J.B.’s father, a crusty judge played by the marvelous Bill Camp, wonders how anyone could sell that garbage abstract art. Case closed.
All this plays out against the background crackle of the war in Vietnam. J.B.’s daylight robbery seems painfully petty by comparison with the invasion of Cambodia, but it is potent enough to derail his life. His failure to do anything resembling work, even to manage taking his boys to school in the morning while his wife Terri (Alana Haim) goes to her dreary office, is well known; the politics of women’s liberation has yet to revolutionize the personal in their house. He is an art-school drop-out with big ideas of his own hitherto unexploited talents. In a small town, that makes him a likely suspect.
Reichardt isn’t interested in action — she often cuts to the aftermath of a decisive act rather than showing it, which breaks the momentum while we try to catch up with what has happened off screen — but the narrative moves steadily, tension tightening as it becomes clear that J.B. has signally failed to cover his tracks. That tension slumps as he tries to escape and the film drifts into its real subject, the destruction of the Moody family’s easy prelapsarian lives. The further away J.B. gets from home, the clearer it becomes that he has delivered his own doom. The film, so enjoyably wacky at first, deflates and drifts to a stop like one of its showboat cars running on empty.
Meanwhile, however, there is a lot of fun to be had. Reichardt’s previous films, such as her retro westerns Meek’s Cutoff and First Cow, have tended towards sludge and shadows, but her competition closer opens with the golden leaves of a New England fall, slightly faded to the paler golds of an Ektachrome postcard of the era. Rob Mazurek’s jazz soundtrack loops crazily over the street scenes introducing us to the neat town of Framingham; we could be heading into a crime caper as interpreted by the French New Wave. It is only after the police arrive — including an art expert with a vast Tom Selleck moustache — that the palette deepens into morose indoor browns and miserable darkness of Greyhound terminals.
Josh O’Connor can be an irritatingly mannered actor, but here he settles into a beardy slacker persona, free of any tricks or tics, that is a perfect fit for Reichardt’s laconic style. Around him, the film is peppered with odd cameos and support acts, from the schoolgirl affecting a beret and muttering to herself in French who interrupts the robbery, to the old friends from art college who put him up for the night when he’s on the run, played by Gaby Hoffmann and that undersung treasure, John Magaro. These days, Maude does a lot of gardening. Fred’s highlight this season has been shaving his beard.
As far as Fred is concerned, his old friend’s escapade is the most exciting thing to have happened in his own life for as long as he can remember, even though, in truth, it didn’t happen in his own life. It’s one of the strengths of Kelly Reichardt’s film — which will live, like all her films, as among the most interesting marginalia of American cinema — that she manages to turn a simple heist story into a sidelong look at an entire generation.
Title: The Mastermind
Festival: Cannes (Competition)
Director/screenwriter: Kelly Reichardt
Cast: Josh O’Connor, Hope Davis, Lana Haim, Gaby Hoffmann
Sales agent: The Match Factory
Running time: 1 hr 13 mins
