The Mastermind review - another slim but nourishing slice of Americana from Kelly Reichardt

The clatter of cool jazz on the soundtrack announces writer-director Kelly Reichardt’s latest project, the kind of score that back in the day would have announced a film by a maverick new talent. The film, her ninth, has been given a faded and vintage look, tricked out in shades of greige and tan that you see in ageing photos of the 1970s, as if it too was shot then.

The setting is leafy Framingham, Massachusetts; the date some time at the start of the 1970s. But it’s a film about the American Sixties as much as anything, a turbulent era that has left a legacy of war, draft-dodging and growing civil unrest in Reichardt’s scenario. She subtly inserts this back story into the narrative. We hear snippets of radio interviews about student unrest; televisions replay the latest news from Vietnam and, now, Cambodia; bulletins end with a rousing rendition of The Star-Spangled Banner while our protagonist, JB (Josh O’Connor), labours on a cabinet for his passion project. Later, through a hotel window, he spots a solemn newscaster on a TV screen next door; on the street he passes a Nixon poster. 

None of this national convulsion seems to have registered with him. He is an art school graduate, now trying to embark on a career as a cabinet-maker. His father, a crusty judge (Bill Camp), has no truck with modern art, especially the abstract kind; he has little sympathy for JB’s ambitions either, praising a friend’s son who now runs his own business. But can he make a good cabinet, scoffs JB. His mother (Hope Davis), is a prim Waspy type, though you can sense her desperation at JB’s lack of career progress. At his home, his two young sons are fairly ungovernable, and his wife (Alana Haim) is stolidly suffering, obliged to play breadwinner in what seems like a soulless office.

Our first sight of JB, though, is on a family visit to the local art gallery, where he seems to be sizing up not just the paintings, and the backs of the paintings, but the layout, the security provision. Almost as a cheeky trial run, he quietly opens a display case and pockets an antique chess player from it. Yes, this is a heist movie, Reichardt-style, which is to say there's a theft, and it's sadly human in scale, and flawed. JB’s accomplice, Guy (Eli Gelb, from the West End Stereophonic, pictured, left, below), is not that bright, his getaway driver quits so he has to do the driving himself, and the replacement crew member, Ronnie (Javion Allen, pictured, middle, below) is a disaster. But no, this is not really a heist movie, strictly speaking. Reichardt uses the tropes of that genre to shed light on JB. This is a meticulous man – we spend five minutes just watching him stowing the stolen goods, transportable in a special cabinet he has made for them, after he has laboriously climbed up and down a ladder to a loft in a pig barn (the random grunting and snorting of the livestock is a humorous grace note in the scene), having had to remove the paintings from the case temporarily, then carefully put them back in. He’s the kind of man who checks with his wife whether the underwear he is hurriedly packing as he flees town is actually clean.

JB, though, is out of tune with the times and his peers. His friends are dropouts; one has a brother who has fled to a commune in Canada, full of “draft dodgers, radical feminists, dope fiends – nice people”, he tells JB with a wry smile. But JB rejects the idea: “I won’t do well in a foreign country,” he says, not realising that he is in a foreign country already, his own. He’s not a marcher – we see even middle-aged women with placards – he’s not a striver, not a joiner, except in the carpentry sense. He is a man in a bubble.

The beauty of the film is the simplicity of its means. Reichardt has drawn a deceptively unshowy performance from O’Connor, who has perfected the amiable accent and mien of the educated American middle class. He acts at first with self-confidence, but the score’s lone bluesy trumpet (the excellent music, and trumpet-playing, is by Rob Mazurek, my film score of the year) highlights his isolation and lack of inner resources. He becomes a man in borrowed hats and suits. In the final reel, swept along by a crowd, he discovers what his purposelessness has cost him. He is no master, let alone a mastermind.

Reichardt is adept at creating tone in her placing of the camera. When JB is waiting for his accomplices to exit the museum with the swag, we are waiting with him in the car, looking over his shoulder, so that the two thieves – comically wearing pantyhose over their faces that hang down like misshapen elephant trunks – appear as small figures, making them look even more comical, in a Keystone Cops kind of way. And when JB later is bundled into a car full of strange men, we see the scene from the viewpoint of his son Tommy, sitting in their car and watching impassively as his father is driven away into the distance, which somehow accentuates the random oddness of the event. 

Small touches, perhaps, but they build into a piece with a unique feel, here ably aided by the jazz score, which mocks and questions what’s happening, sometimes building up a frantic head of steam when nothing is occurring. Reichardt’s narrative stance is often gently comic, but also underpinned with a moral vision that understands the way of the world. In this film, the moral is that the price we pay for living obliviously may be that we are condemned to a form of oblivion. Her atmospheric films are sui generis: they are not epic or grandiose, yet she handles her material with the subtlety of Jane Austen and the confidence and economy of a de Maupassant short story, doling out twists of fate to their unknowing, and sometimes undeserving, characters. Long may she continue to carve out scripts on her little bit of ivory.

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