Cinecism: Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind, Filling the Silence and the Solitary Father
Words: Maia Wyman
Kelly Reichardt's latest feature, The Mastermind, was review-bombed on Google. At the time of writing, it has a 1.9 rating, brought down by accounts from audiences that the film, about an art heist gone wrong, is “too slow,” “pretentious,” and lacking in substance.
In recent years, there has been an uptick of films like the one described above — movies that fill their runtimes with drawn out shots and sparse dialogue, using the language of Tarkovsky-esque slow cinema to mask a dullness beneath. I’ve been prolific in my distaste for this kind of movie. When it comes to The Mastermind, however, I disagree. Reichardt's movie is slow, yes, but it’s anything but dull. On the contrary, I see it as the denouement of a filmmaking prowess that knows exactly how and why to hold our gaze (well apparently, some of ours’).
Starring Josh O’Connor in arguably his most challenging role to date, The Mastermind is about J.B Mooney, an unemployed father who organizes an art heist that goes terribly wrong. The rest of the movie concerns itself with J.B.’s struggle to evade punishment. On the surface, it looks as though Reichardt has sketched J.B in the likeness of a Bresson character—toying, moody, lonely, and amoral, like Michel from Pickpocket (1959). But, where in Pickpocket (1959) where we marvel at the technical ability of Michel’s sleight-of-hand, watch him train his fingers like Rocky running the stairs, in The Mastermind we marvel at J.B’s inability.
The Mastermind is a film about the shitty dads who ran out on our elders, long gone and trapped inside tales shared around the dinner table. My alcoholic grandfather, my other grandfather, a yeller, my great grandfather, a philanderer—it’s a story about the men of our pasts who sucked at providing, but we choose to love them, or the ghosts of them, anyways, despite ourselves.
“The character revealed to us is a man, not escaped, but awash with privilege.”
What is daddy up to right now? The reality, says Reichardt, is not so alluring. Moving against genre, Reichardt turns the entropy of J.B.’s life - what could easily become the coked-out third act of Goodfellas - into a careful character study. Her’s is a movie composed of interstices, its power lies in the moments of inbetween, where human behaviour reveals itself most lucidly. Drawing from her personal philosophy that moviemaking ultimately boils down to the condensing and spreading of time, Reichardt chooses here to spread, to stay with a character and observe them for as long as possible. In The Mastermind, it’s not the curious police officer driving up to the museum in response to a disturbance, it’s the barely-legible wrinkle on J.B’s browline as he watches the cop car pull up. It’s J.B. and Maude, his friend’s disapproving wife, played by the inimitable Gaby Hoffman, standing on her porch in total silence, looking in different directions and letting out an occasional cough. It’s J.B. cutting out his passport photo as the camera, bored, pans the room around him. Or the camera sitting still, like an unhelpful friend, watching J.B. stow the paintings up in the loft of a bar and several times climb the ladder, each time more cumbersomely than the last.
The character revealed to us is a man, not escaped, but awash with privilege. Unlike a Bressonian hero, J.B. is not a loner on the fringes of society, but a person with a full life, a house and a wife and two sons that he, in his hapless pursuit of self-fulfillment chooses, again and again, to abandon. Set against the tumultuous backdrop of the early 70s, with Arthur Dove’s paintings at the centre of its drama, the film holds up J.B. as the true outcome of Modernist subjecthood and alienation. The draft, and Kent state, and hippie discord exist, in Reichardt’s words, “just on the edges of the frame.” Something optionable to J.B. - he can simply remove himself from as he wishes.
Like the society around him, J.B.’s family is also crumbling apart. As J.B. lives out his own half-baked fantasies, the people who cannot just choose to leave, like his wife, are left to hold down the fort. In the last scene, when he decides to finally walk among the hoard, a group of Vietnam protesters, J.B. 's motives are still entirely his own, solitary. Yet his fate, which lies beyond the confines of the screen but likely leads to a much harsher punishment than the men he shares a jail truck with, is a solitary one as well.
In a time where our two options seem to be bloated, sensational superhero movies and empty, boring films by directors who never learned how to write, Reichardt digs her heels in the sand and becomes the architect of our attention. She sits and waits for the inevitable to make itself present on our screens, and the result may feel disappointing, just like the man that J.B. represents. The real mastermind, of course, is her.
