It’s difficult to say what truly motivates James Blaine Mooney (Josh O’Connor) to blow up his own life. Frustration, perhaps, with an uninspired suburban existance with his wife Terri (Alana Haim) and their two rambunctious sons Tommy and Carl (Jasper and Sterling Thompson). A juvenile desire to embarrass his father, a county judge, in front of their community? Perhaps it’s sheer, pig-headed hubris – he’s an art school drop out relying on hand-outs from his parents which he claims are to fund his bespoke furniture-making business, while scheming to steal four Arthur Dove paintings from the small but well-appointed Framingham Art Museum he takes his family to visit on the regular. He recruits some acquaintances into the scheme (whom will prove his eventual undoing) but the theft is entirely JB’s brainchild. Besides the obvious benefit of financial gain, it’s such a deeply unwise thing to do, Kelly Reichardt’s Vietnam era heist drama is immediately engaging in its opaqueness.
The crime itself is a comedy of ineptitude, but once it’s over JB – with his staggering hubris – fancies himself home free. When the heat inevitably close in, JB ditches his family, hitching rides across the Midwest in search of a way out of the hole of his own making, seeking out old friends he can bum accommodation or money off for a night or two. Mooney, an aged-out hippie with a withering stare and effortless talent for deception, seems to feel no remorse or regret, and in the phone calls he makes to his wife and kids, his platitudes are half-hearted at best. For O’Connor, it’s a turn that resembles his sublime performance as tomb-raider Arthur in La Chimera, but there was always something half-hearted about the melancholy architecture expert’s life of crime – JB is a different animal, unmoved by morality. With his Dylan-esque getup, he’s a regular rolling stone, emblematic of the Nixon era of individualism ushered in by the turn of the decade.
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As JB scrambles like a rat in a paper bag, the anti-war movement plays out in the background, with protestors clashing against law enforcement, while dispatches crackle through the radio static and appear in black and white newsreels. The brash isolationism of Mooney stands apart from her usual ruggedly solitary characters; this is a man who had a comfortable middle class handed to him on a plate and decides to torpedo it for a curiously low-stakes art theft that seems to have more sentimental value than monetary. There are shades of Elliot Gould and Gene Hackman in O’Connor here, a chameleon as much as a chimera, while Alana Haim’s small but crucial supporting performance as his had-enough-of-this-shit wife is further proof of her captivating on-screen presence.
Although the premise evokes the golden age of The Coen Brothers and their money-hungry n’er-do-wells, The Mastermind is a tragicomedy as only Reichardt can fashion, shot by Christopher Blauvelt (her regular DoP since Certain Women) drawing inspiration from the era-defining work of William Eggleston and Robby Müller to create images that feel lived-in – warm but distant snapshots of an America on the cusp of permanent fracture. This is Reichardt in Night Moves mode, but with a little more of the comedic energy (culminating in a lilting sadness) found in First Cow. It’s a film that understands there’s nothing to be gained from making oneself an island, but remains stoic and unsentimental in its vision of the past. By the time the film’s crushing, riotous hammer-blow ending comes, we’re left with more questions than answers about what JB’s gambit was all for. Greed? Well, isn’t that just another word for the American Dream?
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