It’s tough to say what actually motivates James Blaine Mooney (Josh O’Connor) to explode his personal life. Frustration, maybe, with an uninspired suburban existance together with his spouse Terri (Alana Haim) and their two rambunctious sons Tommy and Carl (Jasper and Sterling Thompson). A juvenile want to embarrass his father, a county choose, in entrance of their neighborhood? Maybe it’s sheer, pig-headed hubris – he’s an artwork faculty drop out counting on hand-outs from his dad and mom which he claims are to fund his bespoke furniture-making enterprise, whereas scheming to steal 4 Arthur Dove work from the small however well-appointed Framingham Artwork Museum he takes his household to go to on the common. He recruits some acquaintances into the scheme (whom will show his eventual undoing) however the theft is solely JB’s brainchild. Moreover the plain profit of economic acquire, it’s such a deeply unwise factor to do, Kelly Reichardt’s Vietnam-era heist drama is straight away participating in its opaqueness.
The crime itself is a comedy of ineptitude, however as soon as it’s over JB – together with his staggering hubris – fancies himself house free. When the warmth inevitably shut in, JB ditches his household, hitching rides throughout the Midwest looking for a approach out of the opening of his personal making, in search of out previous buddies he can bum lodging or cash off for a evening or two. Mooney, an aged-out hippie with a withering stare and easy expertise for deception, appears to really feel no regret or remorse, and within the cellphone calls he makes to his spouse and youngsters, his platitudes are half-hearted at greatest. For O’Connor, it’s a flip that resembles his elegant efficiency as tomb-raider Arthur in La Chimera, however there was all the time one thing half-hearted in regards to the melancholy structure professional’s lifetime of crime – JB is a totally different animal, unmoved by morality. Together with his Dylan-esque getup, he’s a common rolling stone, emblematic of the Nixon period of individualism ushered in by the flip of the last decade.
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As JB scrambles like a rat in a paper bag, the anti-war motion performs out within the background, with protestors clashing towards regulation enforcement, whereas dispatches crackle by the radio static and seem in black and white newsreels. The brash isolationism of Mooney stands aside from her common ruggedly solitary characters; this can be a man who had a comfy center class handed to him on a plate and decides to torpedo it for a curiously low-stakes artwork theft that appears to have extra sentimental worth than financial. There are shades of Elliot Gould and Gene Hackman in O’Connor right here, a chameleon as a lot as a chimera, whereas Alana Haim’s small however essential supporting efficiency as his had-enough-of-this-shit spouse is additional proof of her fascinating on-screen presence.
Though the premise evokes the golden age of The Coen Brothers and their money-hungry n’er-do-wells, The Mastermind is a tragicomedy as solely Reichardt can trend, shot by Christopher Blauvelt (her common DoP since Sure Ladies) drawing inspiration from the era-defining work of William Eggleston and Robby Müller to create pictures that really feel lived-in – heat however distant snapshots of an America on the cusp of everlasting fracture. That is Reichardt in Night time Strikes mode, however with a little extra of the comedic vitality (culminating in a lilting unhappiness) present in First Cow. It’s a movie that understands there’s nothing to be gained from making oneself an island, however stays stoic and unsentimental in its imaginative and prescient of the previous. By the point the movie’s crushing, riotous hammer-blow ending comes, we’re left with extra questions than solutions about what JB’s gambit was all for. Greed? Effectively, isn’t that simply one other phrase for the American Dream?
