Directing: B-
Acting: B+
Writing: C
Cinematography: C+
Editing: C+

I find myself thinking maybe I appreciate The Mastermind more in retrospect, once I have allowed it to settle a bit, but I keep coming back to this pertinent question: does that matter? It doesn’t change my experience of sitting through this movie, which occurred in three stages. First, I thought: this is a very compelling premise; this seems fun. Then, I thought: is anything going to happen in this movie that makes sitting through it worth the effort? Finally, I thought: holy Christ, I’m bored.

If you’re a fan of writer-director Kelly Reichardt, you might reasonably argue that this is a me problem and not the movie’s problem. Might is the operative word there. I quite liked Reichardt’s film First Cow (filmed in late 2018; in theaters for one week in March 2020 but pulled due to covid; available on VOD when I reviewed it in late summer 2020), about a cook and a Chinese immigrant scheming to steal milk from the first cow in Oregon Territory.

But Reichardt definitely has a particular style of filmmaking, with long, quiet shots that are perhaps better suited to period pieces from the Old West. The Mastermind is also a period piece, but in a very different way: this one is set in 1970, first in Framingham, Massachusetts and then through several other states. This movie answers the question: “What if Kelly Reichardt made an art heist movie?” It turns out the answer is: “You may not want to sit through it.”

Josh O’Connor is a great actor, and he’s very good in The Mastermind, but I credit him for that far more than I do anything else in this movie. His James Blaine Mooney is an unemployed, married father of two, and he cooks up a scheme to steal four priceless paintings from a local art museum where his parents are members. His choices are all varying levels of foolish from moment one, and the heist sequence itself, in which he enlists the help of two other guys, is far and away the most exciting in the movie—and the fact that even this sequence is pointedly quiet (they are in a museum, after all) says all you really need to know about this movie.

But, you know. I have to write this review.

There’s a different scene that says the most about my personal reaction to this film. James takes the paintings, each carefully protected inside a fabric pouch sewn together by his wife, Terri (Licorice Pizza’s Alana Haim—also talented, but utterly wasted in this part), and slid into slots inside a homemade wooden box case, out to a farm shed for hiding. Reichardt lingers on James’s every move in this scene, even though all it involves is using a ladder to take the paintings up to a hiding spot in the rafters. But he has to pull the sliding lid off the box case; take the paintings up the ladder two at a time; carefully take the box case itself up the ladder; put the paintings back in their slots inside the box case; replace the lid on the box case; then slide the box to the side and cover it in hay. We see all of this happen in real time, and I can understand the intention here, as we’re observing the efforts this guy is going to for what we can see clearly is going to have no payoff making it worthwhile.

The least a movie like this can do for us, though, is to give us a payoff that makes sitting through a deadeningly dull sequence like that worthwhile. At that point in the film, I was still giving The Mastermind the benefit of the doubt: surely this is a foreshadowing of something yet to come that will somehow make all of this satisfying? Not so much. The narrative does return to this location later, and I’ll grant that it happens in an unexpected way. But it’s also definitively anticlimactic. And that’s the takeaway from this entire movie.

James’s accomplices in the robbery come and go in relatively short order, especially Ronnie (Javion Allen), who is a loose canon and surprises the trio by bringing a gun to the heist, thereby making it an armed robbery. I had very mixed feelings about the casting of a Black man in this part, given that he’s basically the guy who ruins what otherwise might have worked out for these other criminals. He’s the one guy who is immediately incompetent, he’s the one guy with a gun, he’s the one guy who gets physically violent with anyone during the ordeal, and he’s the one guy who gets arrested and then coerced into ratting on the others. I certainly don’t blame Javion Allen for simply getting work—and God knows I can’t speak for how he felt about the implications of the part—but from my perspective, this all seemed a little on the nose, particularly for a movie, and a director, which otherwise traffic in subtleties.

A whole lot of The Mastermind is not so much about James figuring out how to get away with what he’s done, but following him as he’s on the run (hence the aforementioned multiple states), trying to outrun what is clearly inevitable for him. To be sort of fair, this film could also have been titled The Hubris of Mediocre White Men, and O’Connor plays the part perfectly. I just felt in the end that his talents were misused here.

We get a lot of other great actors in supporting parts, including Bill Camp and Hope Davis as James’s parents. James makes a brief stop at the home of friends in the country, played by John Magaro, and Gaby Hoffman without a drop of makeup on, making her almost unrecognizable. Hoffman does a lot with very little screen time, but as great as the cast is, none of them could save The Mastermind from being dreadfully dull at worst and tedious at best. The final moment of the film, when James is becoming dangerously desperate, has an almost flippantly amusing quality to it, leaving you to think: all of that, for this? That is clearly the point, but it was a point I left the theater feeling unenriched by.

Overall: C+