Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind is an anti-heist film. There is a heist. It happens early on. The rest of the film is not like that. Reichardt, naturally, would not make a straight-forward crime film. Instead, she opts for the same filmic grammar that Jean-Pierre Melville used in Le Cercle Rouge (1970) — the execution of the crime is understated and about precision, there is no resulting joy or profit, exactly, that comes from taking such a great risk. The Mastermind takes place in 1970, in the suburbs of Massachusetts, cradled by the events of the Civil Rights Movement and social unrest surrounding the Vietnam War. Reichardt, one of our greatest working American filmmakers, makes her film about America and its social systems, more so than about the thrill of a heist — she’s not making a Fast and Furious movie, she’s making an understated and existentialist statement on the banality of crime. What the movie is actually doing, we realize soon after the heist, is showing that this art heist is not a sexy act of rebellion or meaningful come-up, but is yet another dead-end, born from the half-baked plans of a frustrated and unemployed man who is simply reacting to a system that, despite his ambitions, offers no means of upward mobility or opportunity for his young family.
The first act of the film is J.B. Mooney (Josh O’Connor) and his amateur crew conducting an art heist. They successfully get away with a few paintings, which end up sitting in the loft of a barn, and not much else happens about that. The rest of the film, then, is a character study of a man who is becoming unwound by what’s happening around him. He had so many dreams and instead, his life is existential, lonely, muted, drained of any real joy. Taking the paintings has more to do with reasserting control over life than the processes and procedures of partaking in a heist. Mooney doesn’t have any follow-up plan and is left even more directionless after the heist, now pressed by the police, and running from the law for a crime which did nothing to better his life.
What exactly Reichardt means by all of this is up for interpretation. She leaves space for us to fill in the blanks. To make of it what we will. It feels like an invitation for the intentional moviegoer, as her movies so often are, to dig a bit deeper. The goal is not to entertain the audience, so much as it is to keep them guessing, and more importantly, thinking. The cinema of Reichardt welcomes our engagement, which makes it feel literary, and insular. This approach is so different from what is commonly done in modern American films, which all use plot as the machine which drives the movie. For The Mastermind, what happens is not nearly as important as how and why it happens.
The Mastermind never relents to this end. It ends even more grimly than the rest of the movie goes. An appropriate first reaction might be, “what was the point?,” and the even more important follow-up to that, is that the point is to leave with something you can process. A movie after the movie. The reward is not immediate. Sit with the movie for a while and see what else comes to you. There’s more to the character study than what happens. What does not happen is equally or more important.
What transpires is a movie designed against the market. It’s not made for commercial reasons, so that should not be any mark against it. The movie, instead, follows the director’s exacting vision, and catalogues bigger ideas about America. It’s an anti-heist movie, in that the processes and execution of the heist are not the point. But it’s ultimately a more empathetic and human movie as a result, a product of well-executed character study, which understands that in times of deep national unrest, even the best laid plans of mice and men go awry, because sometimes, that’s the only plausible outcome.