A young man plans an art heist, and he is, as the film title implies, a genius. “The Mastermind” then indeed begins with images that convey a hint of criminal prowess, though only on a small scale.
James Blaine “JB” Mooney tests the security conditions during a family excursion to the local museum of a small town in Massachusetts and deftly steals a small, probably not particularly valuable figurine from a display case. After about 15 minutes of the film, however, it becomes clear that the title is irony, and the man would have been kicked out of the gang in Ocean’s Eleven and in every other US heist movie of the last hundred years.
Moreover, “The Mastermind” introduces its actual main character in the opening minutes: the setting. The heist takes place in 1970, and the director Kelly Reichardt and her set designer Anthony Gasparro, who has built Reichardt’s sets since “Certain Women” (2016), have created a world in earthy brown tones that feels authentic—from interior furnishings to corduroy jackets.
Time Portrait of the USA
In its final act, after everything has gone wrong, “The Mastermind” makes it clear that the decade here is not merely decoration for its own sake, but that the director is aiming for a time portrait of the USA. Her film begins with the theft of American still lifes and ends with police brutality at an antiwar demonstration.
From the beginning to the end, however, there is a constant sense of failure. JB Mooney is a carpenter and former art student, who, in quiet anger over the gap between his modest life and the compulsive wish to get rich with little effort, seems to merely exist. Mooney joins Reichardt’s ensemble of slackers—figures who inhabit the gaps and the margins of life, not with the glamour of steadfast outsiders, but because they cannot help it.
The heart these films have for their characters, who are neither heroes nor anti-heroes but rather sit out the myth of the hero, is large. JB Mooney, however, is the first to appear latent as a helplessly unsympathetic figure. Josh O’Connor (“Challengers”, “The Crown”) plays the hapless art thief with raised shoulders and a distinctive physical presence once again.
Desire and Reality Are Incompatible
In body language, the frustrating mismatch between desire and reality manifests. And the equally pronounced vanity here serves as the engine of self-blindness and thoughtlessness. Mooney stumbles from one lousy fuck-up to the next, and the moments when O’Connor’s face subtly reveals threatening glints of self-awareness become more frequent as he twists himself further.
The plan to steal a handful of paintings by the artist Arthur Dove is clumsily assembled. JB Mooney hires a few would-be gangsters who pull stockings over their heads, remove the paintings from the wall, and run back to the car. An unreal undertaking, but based on a real art heist in 1972 at the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts. In reality it yielded at least two Gauguins, a Picasso, and a Rembrandt.
JB Mooney has become fixated on stealing Arthur Dove’s paintings. His father, to add to the misfortune, is a former judge, and he is accordingly unimpressed and asks at the dinner table what all this fuss is about—unaware that the thief is sitting at the table: “One can hardly imagine that all this effort for these abstract paintings would be worth it.”
Silent Comedy
He doesn’t really achieve that either. The effort itself becomes pure silent comedy. The heist scene sits in the middle of the film. The art thieves are, of course, discovered when one lifts paintings from the wall in the middle of the day in a museum.
Not by the sleeping guard, but by a young girl roaming the museum spaces and describing the exhibited artworks in an affected French: “ennuyeux,” “dépravé,” “factice.” The idea that a character here speaks about the genre being gently undermined in this moment by the tools of outsider cinema is at least suggested by the editing.
The art thieves manage, with great effort, to stuff the paintings into the trunk. After that, things go downhill: JB Mooney runs into trouble with local mobsters, and the second half of the film follows the mastermind on a aimless, meandering, action-sparse journey across 1970s America. A cross-country trip that Reichardt’s films often make feel directionless.
Wanting to Get Away From Something
Even when the characters, as in “Old Joy” or “Meek’s Cutoff,” have a goal or, as here, want to get away from something. The direction life is supposed to take is neither clear on the screen nor off it, and accordingly the usual cinematic storytelling conventions, which always assume that the people being told about undergo a describable development and thus a story, are perforated.
In “The Mastermind” these conventions are struck through, and an initially disorienting dynamic arises, as is typical in this work, which radically slows the common speeds and rhythms of the genres to which it refers (the road movie in “Old Joy” and “Wendy and Lucy,” the western in “Meek’s Cutoff” and “First Cow,” the political thriller in “Night Moves”).
The narrative coagulates, so to speak. The Mastermind drives aimlessly through the landscape, talks on the phone with his disappointed wife (Alana Haim), but is primarily concerned with himself. The character falls silent more and more, the big mouth becomes quiet. And where once a heist plot dictated the structure—planning, execution, consequences—there is now only a static state to be seen, slowly drawn: restive, irreversible failure.
Fragile Stillness
This supposed stillness makes Reichardt’s films appear extremely brittle at first glance. If you do accept this stillness, you enter a space of contemplation and inward-focused concentration.
“The Mastermind” is a film of the smallest gestures, and Kelly Reichardt is one of the most subtle filmmakers today. What matters happens in the gaps, and once again you are presented with a lot of empty space, activities that in genre cinema would typically be considered not worth telling, and waiting laid bare before your eyes.
‘The Mastermind’. Director: Kelly Reichardt. With Josh O’Connor, Alana Haim, and others. USA 2025, 110 min.
And all of that in the case of “The Mastermind” is, at least from the last third of the film, like in slow motion. Reichardt avoids the mannerisms of slow cinema. The slowness of these images is not an end in itself and not even a stylistic device, but a prerequisite for letting what is to be shown emerge.
Reichardt’s stories unfold on the margins, and not in heroic subcultures that oppose them, but where unfortunate ordinary people try to wring happiness out of life and the society in which they must live. Behind the calm surface of these films lies something like a realistic tragedy, not elevated by entertainment, but by a tragic realism.
