‘Mastermind’ review: Josh O’Connor isn’t the smartest art thief

Kelly Reichardt’s watchful cinema is one of the indie world’s great bounties, a space of patrons (“Meek’s Cutoff,” “First Cow”), artists (“Showing Up”) and itinerants (“Old Joy,” “Wendy and Lucy”) that hold your attention as much as an emergency waiting room does, which remains tense.

One might not view a heist film in such anthropological terms. Yet Mastermind, Reichardt’s latest film and one of her best, shot through a daylight art collective organized by middle-class suburban Massachusetts Josh O’Connor, is another meticulously transformed Reichardt film: honest, sad, funny, and inherently philosophical about our connection to the world. As you might expect, it’s really about the consequences of the crime, as what we take away from this heist is a fascinating, fascinating character study rooted in apathy that juxtaposes starkly with the tumultuous year it is set in: 1970.

By the looks of things, James Mooney (O’Connor), the soft-spoken, unemployed carpenter, is not obvious criminal material, no matter what jazz composer Ray Mazurek’s score might suggest. James shows off at his local art museum, often with his wife, Teri (Alana Haim), and two young children. Otherwise, James is just a distracted father, an isolated husband, a disappointing son who lives off his parents’ prestige and largesse, a respectable judge (Bill Camp) and a gregarious mother (Hope Davis).

However, based solely on a mistake-prone heist – it’s been ages since pantyhose masks have looked so ridiculous – theft isn’t this spoiled man’s strong suit either. (You didn’t think that was a respectable nickname, did you?) When he later stashes the stolen paintings in a farm hayloft and accidentally knocks the ladder out from under him, the moment is amusing and appropriately metaphorical.

Reichardt reveals the deviance of a distinguished man, particularly with O’Connor’s extremely hypnotic conveying of self-ignorance through his sad eyes, posture and movement. As the film then begins to elope, the early autumn colors of Christopher Blauvelt’s cinematography shift to greyscales and darker interiors, and James’s vibe is less rebellious and elusive to the capture – even if a visiting friend (John Magaro) expresses admiration – than a solitary loser who leaves a mess in his wake, an assessment that radiates from Gaby Hoffman as the wife Magaro. The bebop groove abandons James as well, and he slows down for a jagged drum solo.

The last contextual insult is the details of the period itself: Nixon posters, anti-war signs, footage of Vietnam on television, a protest march. It is unforced but ever-present in Reichardt’s spectacle, reminding us that this bored aesthete’s adventure is a particularly empty way of bucking conformity. When a good problem looms, why choose the bad one?

One can even detect, in Reichardt’s brilliant, captivating gem about luck and fate, what it was in relation to her disaffected male hero: Is today’s version of James, equally arrogant and arrogant, stealing art to assuage his own emptiness? Or, thanks to the Internet, could you succeed at something much worse? “Mastermind” may be an ironic title when it comes to heists. But it also indicates that the bad masculine pattern is yet to come.