‘The Mastermind’ evaluate: Josh O’Connor is not the sharpest artwork thief

Kelly Reichardt’s watchful cinema is among the indie world’s most beautiful bounties, an area for pioneers (“Meek’s Cutoff,” “First Cow”), artists (“Exhibiting Up”) and wanderers (“Outdated Pleasure,” “Wendy and Lucy”) who command your consideration the best way an ER ready room does, lingering tensely.

One won’t take into account a heist movie in such anthropological phrases. And but “The Mastermind,” Reichardt’s newest and certainly one of her greatest, whereas set in movement by a daylight artwork seize orchestrated by Josh O’Connor’s middle-class Massachusetts suburbanite, is one other exactly turned Reichardt film: sincere, unhappy, humorous and inherently philosophical about our engagement with the world. As you may anticipate, it’s actually concerning the crime’s aftermath, our reduce from this theft being a deft, fascinating character examine rooted in an apathy that’s starkly juxtaposed with the restive 12 months it’s set in: 1970.

By the look of issues, preppy, soft-spoken James Mooney (O’Connor), an unemployed carpenter, isn’t apparent felony materials, it doesn’t matter what composer Ray Mazurek’s propulsive, horn-forward jazz rating may suggest. James circumstances his native artwork museum, usually together with his unwitting spouse, Teri (Alana Haim), and two younger boys in tow. In any other case, James is only a distracted dad, checked-out husband and disappointing son residing off the standing and largesse of his dad and mom, an esteemed choose (Invoice Camp) and a society mom (Hope Davis).

Nonetheless, based mostly solely on the error-prone heist — it’s been ages since pantyhose masks appeared so ridiculous — thievery isn’t this spoiled man’s robust swimsuit both. (You didn’t suppose that title was respectful, did you?) When he’s stashing the stolen work later in a farmhouse’s hayloft and unintentionally knocks the ladder out from below him, the second is amusing and appropriately metaphorical.

Reichardt is laying naked a privileged man’s half-assed delinquency, particularly with O’Connor so hypnotic at conveying self-absorbed cluelessness together with his woeful eyes, posture and motion. Because the film then hits the highway for his escape, the early fall colours of Christopher Blauvelt’s cinematography shift to grey tones and darker interiors, and James’ vibe is much less insurgent eluding seize — even when a pal he visits (John Magaro) expresses admiration — than alienated loser forsaking a multitude, an evaluation radiating from Gaby Hoffmann as Magaro’s spouse. The bebop groove abandons James, too, slowing into jagged drum solos.

The final contextual indignity are the main points of the interval itself: Nixon posters, anti-war indicators, Vietnam footage on televisions, a protest march. Unforced however ever-present in Reichardt’s mise-en-scène, they remind us that this bored aesthete’s misadventure is an particularly empty approach to buck conformity. When good hassle beckons, why decide the dangerous type?

One may even detect, on this sensible, fascinating Reichardt gem about fortune and destiny, a what-if hooked up to her disaffected male protagonist: Would right this moment’s model of James, simply as adrift and smug, steal artwork to assuage his vacancy? Or, because of the web, succeed at one thing a lot worse? “The Mastermind” could also be an ironic title as heists go. However it additionally hints on the male-pattern badness nonetheless to come back.