LGM Film Club, Part 538: The Mastermind

I generally love the films of Kelly Reichardt. Part of that is that she, along with Gus Van Sant, are the great Oregon directors. But that’s not really it, even if maybe it is a little bit on the margins. It’s that she tells these stories that seem slow but in fact are deep character studies about fascinating situations, both contemporary and historical. First Cow and Meek’s Cutoff are both great films about 19th century Oregon settlement. Michelle Williams has done astounding work in Reichardt films, including in Meek’s Cutoff and especially Wendy and Lucy. Old Joy was such a lovely film about male friendship. Night Moves–not the great Gene Hackman film that sums up the 70s like almost no other movie–is a fantastic film about the choices made by ecoterrorists and their potential costs. I wasn’t such a huge fan of Showing Up, but that’s mostly because watching contemporary Portland artists work just isn’t a very interesting topic to me but of course Williams was super in that too.

Reichardt has left Oregon for this film at least, going to Massachusetts in 1970 as the setting for The Mastermind, a film where the title is 100% in jest. Starring Josh O’Connor, who is excellent at playing this kind of manchild reprobate character (see his work in Luca Guadgnino’s recent film The Challengers, which I also watched recently), the film follows this man who decides to become an art thief and is in fact just a fucking idiot, the kind of criminal who wants to be a bigshot, but is too stupid to think through the first issue around his crimes. Predictably, it goes incredibly poorly.

The film’s problem is that the stakes are so, so low. Who cares about this loser? O’Connor is great. But Alana Haim as his wife is given quite literally nothing to do. Hope Davis plays his mom and she at least frets about the fact that her intelligent son is a loser who she is still loaning money to in his 30s. The child actors are at least a hell of a lot better than they were in the 30s. The film, being a Reichardt movie, is no classic heist film–we are a long ways from Rififi here. It doesn’t move super fast, but it kind of does for a Reichard film. But to what end? Some reviewers thought this one of the best films of last year. But while I can see all the skill and all the great work, to me it’s a failure because there’s not enough dramatic tension to push this through. It’s just a spoiled dumbass being a spoiled dumbass getting even dumber.

In addition to the acting, there is one point in the film’s favor, which is that it makes it very clear that most Americans really didn’t give a fuck about Vietnam or the invasion of Cambodia, even as it was happening. Such was true then and is true about Iran today. So it’s useful to set the film during Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia and the highlight of the film is the very end and how history and the plot come together for a good chuckle, if nothing else.