The movies of Kelly Reichardt are slow, quiet, full of small gestures and implications, more concerned with the contours of their worlds than the beats of a plot. Her latest film, The Mastermind, is set in Massachusetts in 1970, a year of violence, civil unrest and protest.
We see only glimpses of war coverage on TV newscasts, usually as someone is passing through a room, and sometimes overhear it on radio reports right before the channel is changed. That’s because our protagonist, J.B. (Josh O’Connor), doesn’t care to look at it or think too much about it.
For J.B., the real world is always a bit out of focus. All he can think about is himself, his interests and his next grift. When he goes with his wife and two sons to an art museum, he quietly opens a display case, grabs a figurine and walks out with it. This is the prelude to a more elaborate heist that will come later and that we know, long before J.B. does, will not go according to his sketchy plan.
Reichardt, inspired by the icy noir of Jean-Pierre Melville, gives us a hero who is himself a blank canvas. He’s a freelance cabinet maker, though we never see him build anything. He stays at home while his wife Terri (Alana Haim) goes to her office job, and he sits silently through family dinners while his parents (Bill Camp and Hope Davis) wonder why he can’t do more with his life.
We come to learn a bit more about J.B., although not until the movie’s second half. The first half of The Mastermind is, technically, about the art heist. It’s quick, messy and mostly off-camera, which contrasts with an extended scene of James hiding the stolen paintings in the rafters of a barn. It seems to go on forever — he unboxes the paintings, climbs a ladder, comes down, climbs up again — and the sheer duration of it brings tension.
J.B.’s interactions with others are often charged with a history of unspoken betrayal. When Terri decides to take the kids and stay with her in-laws for awhile, J.B. dutifully packs her a suitcase as if he’s been pre-programmed. Later, he hides out with some old friends (John Magaro and Gaby Hoffmann), and her silences around him are so potent that they’re practically shouting at us.
This is the sort of texture that makes Reichardt’s films interesting, but sometimes difficult and — at least for me — so oblique that they don’t even register. But The Mastermind is just about perfect, a movie whose impeccable atmosphere and eye for period detail are at such beautiful odds with its messy, mysterious main character. O’Connor, who has been in seemingly every other movie this year, makes you lean in and want to study him. He’s smart to keep J.B. beyond our grasp.
The movie is also slyly funny, although you may not realize it until it’s over and you think back on it. It isn’t until one final twist of dramatic irony that you understand how J.B.’s hijinks have been distractions from the turmoil swirling around him. It’s like that abstract piece on the gallery wall that you stare at and stare at until your eyes go cross. And then finally, just when you’re about to give up, you see something new in it and it all comes together.
Nathan Weinbender is one of the film critics heard on Spokane Public Radio’s Movies 101, Friday evenings at 6:30 PM and Saturday afternoons at 2 PM on SPR News (KPBX).