Kelly Reichardt’s latest, a sly 1970s drama involving a museum theft, probes the broken politics of the decade.
James Mooney (Josh O’Conner), or J.B. for short, is a dime-a-dozen suburban malcontent who believes he deserves more than a middle-class life. His two kids and beautiful working wife, Terri (Alana Haim), the classic two-story home with a yard and a garage—these trappings hold no interest in someone who studied to be an artist but settled for sporadic work as a carpenter. J.B.’s wealthy parents, a circuit court judge (Bill Camp) and casual philanthropist (Hope Davis), encourage him to take control of his time, make more of himself. Resentful of their condescending, cultivated attitudes, he takes their advice, just not in the way they intended.
With a “loan” from his mother, J.B. enlists three henchmen to steal four paintings by the early abstract painter Arthur Dove from the fictional Framingham Museum of Art, getting the idea after repeatedly surveying the place and impulsively stealing a figurine under the guards’ noses. The museum’s vulnerability, its presumption of safety, catalyzes the inciting action in Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind. The heist—a robbery in broad daylight, in direct sight of numerous patrons and sleepy security guards—goes awry almost immediately. One accomplice steals a car but backs out as the getaway driver on the day; another brings a gun and a nervy attitude that turns the whole affair into armed robbery. Bumbling and flustered, they get the paintings out of the museum, but not without raising their profiles to the point where notoriety and warrants are all but a given. The question that hangs over the rest of the film is why J.B. orchestrated the crime at all.
Reichardt has never been in the business of explicating the motives of her characters, preferring suggestion to underlining, but The Mastermind’s setting sheds some light on J.B.’s opaque impulses. The year is 1970: America had just expanded its operations in Vietnam to Cambodia; anti-war protests proliferated following the Kent State massacre, and hippie culture hadn’t yet been fully absorbed into the mainstream. Too old and fettered with responsibilities to follow in Timothy Leary’s footsteps, and too young to ignore the blowing cultural winds, J.B. finds himself caught between the fresh air of revolution and a stale domestic atmosphere. But as much as he wants to reject society, he does so within the confines of bourgeois comfort. J.B. is the type of person who views politics as images to be consumed on the news, something that happens to other people, instead of a current through which we all wade. That is, until the wave of history comes crashing down on his head at the moment he least expected it.
Politics animates Reichardt’s films in a reserved, understated fashion. No one says the word “patriarchy” in her first feature, River of Grass, a “couple-on-the-run” film sapped of any romance or crime, but a growing awareness that small-town society circumscribes women’s choices propels apathetic housewife Cozy to find any excuse to reject her prescribed fate. The ruthless, zero-sum engine of capitalism forces the homeless Wendy of Wendy & Lucy and the marginalized duo in First Cow to commit petty theft just to stay afloat. Reichardt has built a unique filmography centered upon ordinary outsiders in states of transition, who, she has said, “don’t have a net, who if you sneezed on them, their world would fall apart.” By depicting their desperation with unwavering respect, Reichardt observes the ways inequitable American systems impact her subjects’ personal behavior and material decisions.
Reichardt’s political sensibility largely permeates through setting and characterization; if she engages with big-picture national politics, it’s through intimation or metaphor. The Great Recession lent Wendy & Lucy topical resonance upon its release in 2008, despite the fact that the story of an impoverished woman’s struggle to traverse the country could reasonably occur in any era. Meek’s Cutoff, Reichardt’s explicit entrée into the Western genre, chronicles an arrogant frontier guide leading an ill-fated expedition across the Oregon High Desert as he loses the trust of his flock, an allegorical narrative inflected by the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq.
However, occasionally Reichardt addresses foundational rot head on. Like The Mastermind, Night Moves (2013), Reichardt’s most explicitly political work, also utilizes the framework of a heist film as a tool for commentary. Following three environmentalists who blow up a dam and face unintended consequences, Night Moves examines a spectrum of left activism, from a small organic farm community whose sustainable efforts have a muted impact to enraged ideologues who take up the mantle of radical change. Reichardt doesn’t give voice to falsely equivalent talking points about the value of political action. The underlying assumption is that something needs to be done, that there is an “us” and “them,” and violence and destruction are valid, albeit risky, reactions to a stultifying status quo.
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Though it doesn’t initially present itself as such, The Mastermind is a similarly overt political text that, in a first for Reichardt, even edges toward a clear, if clumsy, moral conclusion. “I grew up in the ’70s with Patty Hearst in the news…and Angela Davis’ trial. I grew up in Miami, where the convention went bananas, and my father was on the bomb squad for 20 years,” Reichardt remembers in a Filmmaker interview around the release of Night Moves. The Mastermind predates the marked uptick in bombings and airline hijackings across America that Reichardt references, but it anticipates the moment when that simmering frustration—catalyzed by a decade of war, assassinations, and cultural upheaval—would eventually boil over.
Reichardt doesn’t reveal these intentions until near the film’s end, burying this upshot in expertly immersive filmmaking. The casual precision of The Mastermind’s period design extends beyond the era’s cars and billboards, encompassing its flat, synthetic-looking food, the earth-toned home décor, and the dulcet sounds of “The Star-Spangled Banner” to mark the end of a daily television broadcast. She returns to her familiarly patient gaze when she deploys long takes to portray the process of hot-wiring a car or, in an extended scene, J.B. systematically concealing the four stolen paintings inside a crate on top of a roof at a remote pig farm. While Christopher Blauvelt’s soft, autumnal photography infuses each frame with a faded texture, Reichardt’s direction keeps the action firmly in the present tense.
The disembodied voices emanating from left-wing Air America radio in Reichardt’s ’00s-set Old Joy epitomizes the final tether the film’s estranged pair have to their former radical selves. But in The Mastermind, the overheard news reportage of campus protests and Vietnam dispatches are menacing harbingers of a political divide that will continue to expand over the next 50 years, only no one on screen seems to be heeding the message. “The university rewards silence,” explains a college activist being interviewed on TV as he details how picketing faculty face harsher punishment than those who decline to participate in protests. His grievances regarding the “tremendous feelings of powerlessness, cynicism, apathy on the part of large numbers of people” become mere ambient noise in the Mooney household, which is on the precipice of dinnertime. It’s a sharp illustration of the looming “‘Me’ Decade” that will contribute to the slow death of progressive New Deal–style principles.
In 1972, Florian “Al” Monday orchestrated a robbery of four paintings at the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts. He hired two men to steal two Gauguins, a Picasso, and a painting originally attributed to Rembrandt; they held a small group of high schoolers at gunpoint while they were gathering their loot and shot a security guard on the way out, making it the first armed art heist in history. The paintings, which were worth $1 million at the time, were eventually recovered from a Rhode Island pig farm. Monday’s robbery was the first of many similar smash-and-grab art thefts throughout the ’70s, which proliferated because of scant museum security as a result of stagflation-influenced funding cuts. Though these incidents dwindled as museums embraced tighter security measures, particularly since the unsolved 1990 heist at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, they still occur. (On October 19, two men stole priceless jewels from Paris’s Louvre Museum in just seven minutes at 9:30 in the morning.)
Reichardt based the theft in The Mastermind on the Monday heist, retaining most of the pertinent details while switching the paintings to four by early American modernist Dove, who specialized in abstract landscapes and experimental collages. Though she reportedly had a research folder of various art robberies, she became intrigued by Monday because he once fronted a rockabilly group whose 45″-record she actually owns. The rock-’n’-roller-turned-criminal offered a glimpse of his motives to the authors of Stealing Rembrandts, a book on notorious art heists: “To an art lover, possessing a Rembrandt can be likened to winning the World Series, the Super Bowl, and the Stanley Cup all at once.”
Like Monday, J.B. is also an art lover, evidenced by the work that litters the walls of his house and his impressive hand-drawn renditions of the Dove paintings he shares with his coconspirators. Reichardt and O’Connor emphasize the care J.B. exhibits toward the actual paintings, in sharp contrast to the recklessness of the plot to acquire them. He also sees the value of Dove’s work, which wasn’t much appreciated in the ’70s, unlike his father, who, after hearing news of the robbery, claims that they won’t go for much on the black market. Though J.B. might have been playing the long game (Dove’s paintings now go for millions at auction), money doesn’t dominate his outlook. He sees himself in the obscure artist, and the unrecognized beauty of his output, which can be conferred on himself through possession.
However, Reichardt stresses the bored selfishness of J.B.’s actions. She frequently captures O’Connor from a slight distance, often in profile or facing away from the camera, like he’s out of step with the demands of the frame. But unlike Bobby Dupea in Five Easy Pieces (1970), another privileged “hero” unfit for mainstream America, J.B.’s ambivalence doesn’t push him to search, only destroy. To steal art from a museum as a means of profiteering quite literally translates to stealing a community good to enrich oneself, an insidiously greedy practice encouraged by our financial and political systems. J.B.’s quasi-rebellion might broadly be in lockstep with the actions of young left subversives, at least in the way that he sends shock waves throughout his sleepy town, but there’s no communal benefit to his crime. It’s an act of pure individualism, which is somewhat fitting considering that Dove influenced the successive generation of American abstract expressionists, whose work was co-opted by the CIA to promote American subjectivity and personal freedom.
After the cops set their sights on J.B., and a group of local gangsters commandeer the paintings, he eventually decamps west, leaving his family behind for good. He hides out in the country with friends Fred (John Magaro) and Maude (Gaby Hoffmann); Fred commends J.B. for no longer “chipping away at the edges,” while Maude, wary and skeptical, eventually tells him to leave. In classic Reichardt style, the few women in his life see J.B. as who he really is: a coddled, noncommittal egotist whose privilege has kept him from acquiring any morality, or community, of his own. The damning final look Terri gives him as he drives away indicates that she’s known the truth about her husband for quite some time.
But as J.B. eventually enters the Midwest, Reichardt accentuates the dissonance between J.B.’s furtive actions and the highly charged atmosphere through which he moves. After initially dismissing Fred’s suggestion about going up to Canada to his brother’s commune—a place filled with draft dodgers, radical feminists, dope fiends, “good people” in other words—the crushing alienation he feels moving between flophouses and boarding rooms eventually gets to him. He forges a passport while the TV blares about news from the front lines of the recent Cambodian invasion; he passes the time in a bar while two Black men discuss their wartime experiences overseas.
The world keeps encroaching onto J.B. until, eventually it’s on top of him. Stranded in Ohio with no money for a bus ticket to Canada, he spots an elderly woman with a purse full of money. He brazenly steals her pocketbook, pinches the cash and abandons the wallet, before trying to slip away unnoticed through an anti-war protest. But when a young man innocently tries to return the wallet to J.B., he’s brutalized by a cop and thrown into the back of a paddy wagon. The Mastermind’s final scene features J.B. protesting his innocence, with his muffled pleas roundly ignored, until the van drives off while a group of cops stand around cracking wise about their violent treatment of the protesters.
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The saliency of Reichardt’s message lies in tension with the sequence’s multiple contrivances. The series of events culminating in J.B.’s arrest are believable on the one hand but feel uncommonly jury-rigged on the other, especially relative to Reichardt’s realist filmography. A lingering shot of Richard Nixon’s smirking visage prior to J.B.’s mugging strikes an egregiously unsubtle note, again, especially within an otherwise restrained work. J.B.’s aesthetic coup from the museum trickling down to common larceny, his brief acknowledgment of selfless generosity precipitating his arrest, his anonymity outside of Framingham guaranteeing that his influence will prove worthless—it all feels remarkably blunt for a filmmaker who has never taken to using screenwriting as a pulpit.
But as much as I bristled against the exaggerated dramaturgy upon an initial viewing, I warmed up to it on rewatch, at least partially because I accept that an unexpected jolt into consciousness arrives with the subtlety of a cartoon mallet. For J.B. to understand that he can’t ignore the times that are-a changin’, even as America will continue to bury its head further and further in the sand, he requires an unavoidable incident, one that directly implicates him. As Reichardt illustrates from the film’s beginning, he’s been ignoring the signs all around him, both because he could and because he wanted to. Sometimes it takes the war arriving on our doorstep for indifferent fence-sitters to grasp a crucial, oft-repeated tenet of life under fascism: They’re coming for us all.
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