Kelly Reichardt’s “Mastermind” reinvents the heist movie

One of the joys of reviewing films is to witness the artistic achievement of a long-time filmmaker, as happened with Kelly Reichardt. As a serious director with a principled world view, she has previously eschewed style and taste as if they were sins, narrowing her aesthetic to suit the perspectives she conveys in each film. But with “Showing Up” from 2022, she demonstrated, for the first time, uninhibited cinematic joy, an unabashed delight in inventive observation and free beauty. This may not be a coincidence, since the film is about two artists—one who works small and exquisite, the other who works big and exhilarating—and they give each their due. Now with his new film, “Mastermind,” Reichardt goes much further in many dimensions—dramatic, aesthetic, geographical, historical, and moral. It’s one of the freest reimaginings and even one of the most skillfully distinct takes on film storytelling I’ve seen in a while. Moreover, what is gratuitous is its very subject.

“Mastermind” is another art world story, sort of. The film is set in 1970, mainly in Framingham, Massachusetts, where James Blaine Mooney (Josh O’Connor), named J.B., is an unemployed artisan furniture maker whose gentlemanly sense of his craft may be the reason behind it. He lives with his wife, Terry (Alana Haim), the family breadwinner, who works behind a typewriter in an office, and their two remarkable sons, who appear to be only ten years old, Tommy (Jasper Thompson) and Carl (Sterling Thompson). One day, while the family was visiting the (fictional) Framingham Museum of Art, JB found work for his idle hand. He captured a sleeping guard, opened a display case and stole a figurine, extracted it from the glasses case and then inserted it into Terry’s handbag.

Then, with time to kill and energy to burn, JB recruits a few friends — the laid-back, gruff-haired Guy (Eli Gelb), the uptight and outspoken Larry (Cole Doman), and the impulsive Ronnie (Javion Allen) — to steal paintings from the museum. Even before the thieves cross the building’s threshold, “Mastermind” emerges as an instant classic. Reichardt’s careful view of the plot, which is clearly destined for disaster, is both deeply sad and absurdly funny. Terry sews large canvas bags to fit the paintings, and JB shows off his carpentry skills to make a partition box to store the loot. Larry steals a car to escape; The man stops another person to give the pursuers the slip; JB peeks behind one of the paintings to see how it’s hanging, and to guide his crew on which paintings to grab, he draws drawings of it that reveal a skill that is unfortunately being misused. Reichardt’s fanatical attention to the details of art theft conveys a sincere fascination tempered by a dark foreboding implicit in JB’s efforts to anticipate what could go wrong.

Good luck with that. Reichardt also enjoys antics that go wrong: a locked car door can’t be opened; A schoolgirl (Margot Anderson-Song) wearing a hat shows up at the museum during the robbery, speaking in French from a classic play; The parking lot becomes a regular nightmare of obstructions and surveillance; Ultimately, the thieves face the threat of what might be called a rival faction. As meticulous preparations for the heist give way to chaotic improvisation, Reichardt’s awareness of the radical possibility of concerted action—an essentially political idea—far outweighs Paul Thomas Anderson’s interest in the plans of the revolutionary cell and its dangers in “battle after battle.”

The film’s action scenes are built on a strange and innovative social foundation. As the son of a prominent local family, J.B. is a disappointment to his father, Bill (Bill Camp), and a bewilderment – albeit endearing one – to his mother, Sarah (Hope Davis). Their status gives him major advantages that play surprisingly large roles in the story. Here, too, Reichardt carefully weaves a web of correlation and causation that yields a host of outcomes—some well plotted, others ridiculous—that I dare not reveal.

“Mastermind” offers so many narrative surprises that, when discussing it, I feel unusually wary of spoilers. It offers the pleasure of being surprised by major twists and small details whose astonishing originality is worth discussing but which viewers should be allowed to discover unprepared. The heist unfolds in three acts – planning, execution and evasion – and in “Mastermind,” each of the three is strikingly unique in mood and style, with surprising results in both practical and emotional aspects. The most responsible way to communicate joy is to share some details but jump over their place in the plot and go straight to the great conceit that connects them. One of Reichardt’s greatest inspirations is to create a tapestry of political conflict that encompasses the Vietnam War and its manifestations in American society—the news reports, the marches and protests, the voices of reaction, police repression—and weave them into the story as inescapable elements of everyday life.