Josh O’Connor Is at His Hangdog Dirtbag Best in The Mastermind
The Mastermind is a movie about a man who finally reaches the limits of his charm. Most of us hit that wall early, if we were ever lucky enough to coast on the quality at all, but James Blaine Mooney — a father, husband, and aspiring art thief — has managed to reach adulthood relatively unchallenged on his bullshit. How is that possible? Mostly it’s because he looks like Josh O’Connor at his most appealing, which is to say unshaven, in need of a shower, and alarmingly irresistible. There’s this look that O’Connor has been perfecting over the arc of his recent dirtbag canon and that he deploys in this film to excellent effect. It’s an expression of hangdog supplication, body hunched, looking up with his head tilted down in the posture of someone who knows he should be sorry but expects to get away with whatever he’s just done anyway. Most of the time, he’s right, but The Mastermind — which just premiered at Cannes and will be released in theaters later by Mubi — is the story of what it’s like when consequences finally come calling. The movie is writer-director Kelly Reichardt’s take on a heist, which means that in true Reichardt fashion, it doesn’t follow any of the typical rhythms of the genre. Instead, the job takes place toward the start of the film. The rest of the runtime is devoted to the aftermath of the crime, when things start to unravel and threaten to take the rest of James’s seemingly settled reality with it.
Like so much of Reichardt’s output, The Mastermind feels modest when you’re watching it and downright brilliant once it’s had some time to settle in your mind. Her films are so present and unguarded from moment to moment, like they’re unfolding spontaneously, that the thoughtfulness of their details and structure is more easily appreciated in retrospect. For this one, what I kept coming back to were the ways, both big and small, that James hovered over his life rather than actually existing in it. He’s a carpenter, and very proud of his skill, though he doesn’t appear to get many jobs. When his father (Bill Camp) needles him over the dinner table about how much work another carpenter in town is getting, James derides his rival for having to devote so much of his day to accounts and schedules — an “idiotic way to spend your time,” according to a man who spends his dreaming of an easy score. James is married to Terri (Alana Haim), with whom he has two sons, though he doesn’t seem to have fully internalized what it means to take care of them. He’s been going to his mom (Hope Davis) for money, spinning out unsustainable lies about needing equipment and supplies for gigs he doesn’t have. It’s 1970, the Vietnam War is raging, and demonstrators dot the streets, gathering for protests he barely registers.
James is no criminal genius, but he’s just smart enough to get himself in serious trouble. His target, for reasons dripped out later, is a set of abstracts from the lesser-known American painter Arthur Dove, which are hanging in a fictional museum in the real town of Framingham, Massachusetts. In the opening scenes of the movie, we see James case the place while on a visit with his family, eyes watchful as he takes in the sleeping guard in the gallery and checks how the artwork is mounted to the wall, then slyly opens the latch on a display case to palm a figurine inside. The theft seems easy to James, and exciting — Reichardt layers a jazzy score underneath the action that shows up under fitting, then increasingly inopportune moments. But there’s a lot he doesn’t know that he doesn’t know, and once he and his accomplices, Guy (Eli Gelb) and Ronnie (Javion Allen), actually get their hands on the art, he’s forced to learn a lot in a short amount of time. “Honestly, I don’t think you thought things through,” a more experienced crook informs him at one point while robbing him blind.
The Mastermind is all earth tones and autumnal colors, from the sweaters James favors to the paintings he steals, one of which is actually called Yellow Blue Green Brown. It’s a muted palette that makes the movie feel like it’s coming at the end of things, which I guess it is — the end of the year, the end of the ’60s, and the end of James’s life as he knew it. O’Connor exudes the noncommittal aura of his character’s arrested development so skillfully — this is his best performance to date — that his shock when someone (usually a woman) finally gets fed up with him becomes something of an ongoing joke. When he seeks sanctuary with old friends Fred (Reichardt regular John Magaro) and Maude (Gaby Hoffmann), we see him through their eyes, and it’s suddenly unbearably sad. For Fred, James is a novel reminder of youthful folly, but for Maude, he’s someone who never figured out that having connections to other people requires giving as well as taking. “Doesn’t sound like my kind of scene,” James says to Fred when Fred suggests he hide out in his brother’s commune up north. Even on the run, James can’t help but see himself in the position to pick and choose, still waiting on the world to provide him with the opportunity he deserves.