Watching “The Mastermind,” it occurred to me that I love how Kelly Reichardt has characters move within a frame. Her last movie, “Showing Up,” had scenes of Hong Chau and Michelle Williams working on sculptures that have never left me. Similarly, “The Mastermind” features long passages of a man inhabiting vast and lonely settings, especially a museum in Framingham, Massachusetts, that will prove to be durable.
In “Showing Up,” Reichardt communicated the relationships between artists and their work without appearing to do much of anything on the surface. Reichardt’s willingness to allow her movies to be quiet is part of it. She does not traffic in the freneticism of a pop culture that is terrified of giving you a chance not to buy something. Quietness paired with the right actors allow us to feel as if we are seeing the process of thought in motion.
“Showing Up” pivoted on artists while “The Mastermind” is about an aesthete, a man who channels his unrealized artistic energies to disastrous ends. We first see J.B. (Josh O’Connor) drifting through a local museum. His wife, Terri (Alana Haim), and children, Carl and Tommy (Sterling and Jasper Thompson), are nearby and, tellingly, we can’t tell if they are all together at first. J.B. is there and not-there, a passenger in his own life.
Watching for signs of detection, J.B. slips a figurine out of an exhibit, into a case in his pocket. It is 1970 and security isn’t what it is today. Reichardt has based J.B.’s exploits on various cases real and imagined, but I thought of the ingenious lo-fi thefts of Michael Finkel’s book “The Art Thief,” which also featured a man who seemed to be channeling stifled artistic ambitions through stealing. If you can’t create, you can have, and so there’s probably a sly comment on critics in these works. A Brendan Behan quote seems apropos: “Critics are like eunuchs in a harem. They’re there every night, they see it done every night, they see how it should be done every night, but they can’t do it themselves.”
Reichardt is not looking to score points on anyone through J.B., however, as “The Mastermind,” characteristic of its creator’s work, has a rapt sense of curiosity. J.B. is sketched in with sharp strokes. He has a father who is a respected judge (Bill Camp) and a mother (Hope Davis) who indulges his whimsies. J.B. is a carpenter by trade who works infrequently while rivals seem to have no shortage of projects. Intriguingly, Terri seems to be involved with J.B.’s thefts, though that collaboration doesn’t last.
There is a brilliant and telling image of J.B. playing checkers with one of his sons on the carpeted floor of his parents’ house while Terri is in the kitchen with his mother. J.B. is explicitly linked here and elsewhere to a child, and we are made continually aware of the vacancy that’s left by J.B.’s inability to rise to the occasion of husbanding and fathering.
J.B. has a bigger heist in mind, of several Arthur Dove paintings on the second floor of the museum that he visits regularly, where his parents are members. (Alas, not even this museum is his own.) Assembling a trio of screw-ups, whom he pays with money borrowed from his mother, J.B. positions himself as, well, a mastermind, a label and movie title that are inevitably ironic. Of course, the heist goes wrong, and I’m hesitant to reveal too many of the details of failure because they are unpredictable and intensely observed.
Reichardt dismantles the cliches of the heist movie while honoring the pleasures of the genre. The big theft is suspenseful because we are denied the “out” of formula plotting. These are not bad-ass crooks but regular people and their heist is rooted in the textures of regular life. What are the odds of a police officer parking near J.B.’s getaway car to have his lunch? We’ve seen countless shoot-outs, but we haven’t seen this moment before.
When the city’s criminal element catches up to J.B., maybe in cahoots with the police, there isn’t a big torture-and-question scene or a pumped-up escape. They get what they want and send J.B. on his way, as if he’s a child, which is almost more heartbreaking than if they beat him up. The driver for the criminals, a big man with an unexpectedly gentle temperament, says to J.B. that perhaps he didn’t think this all through.
J.B.’s choice of the Dove artwork seems to mean something. They are haunting abstract paintings, at which his father, a successful unimaginative man, scoffs. Reichardt doesn’t make too much of these details but they are there. The imagery of “The Mastermind,” courtesy of cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt, seems almost abstract in its exactitude. You are made aware of the angularity of the images, of their pointed arrangements. The angles contrast with the dreamy auburn lighting, which contrasts again with Robert Mazurek’s jazzy score. The images move slower than the music, a difference that suggests a heartbeat that’s slipped out of rhythm.
“The Mastermind” radically changes direction in its second half. We hear the score less, and J.B.’s quiet ruminations become longer and lonelier. It’s as if the heist has pushed J.B. decisively into his destiny to be apart from society, a subconscious aspiration that is revealed in practice to be a nightmare. A leitmotif of America’s disenfranchisement with the Vietnam war becomes more explicit, and we seem to have wandered into an ambiguous allegory of desertion. There is a difference between deserting out of principle and convenience, a distinction that leads to an ending that is worthy of O. Henry.
Tying everything together is Josh O’Connor, an actor of a hangdog sexiness that’s unusual for his generation, and much more in line with legends like Elliott Gould. O’Connor is very in right now, having appeared in about six movies this year alone, but “The Mastermind” is the one to see of the batch. He’s as comfortable with spareness as Reichardt, and together they sing a poignant absurdist hymn of alienation. It’s almost as if we’re seeing Paul Schrader’s “Oh, Canada” restaged as a bleak and soulful comedy.
I hated “Longlegs” and walked out of “The Monkey” long before it was over, which is to say that I didn’t rush out to see “Keeper,” Osgood Perkins’ third movie in just over a year. Alas, it’s easily the best of the three. I may have given up on Perkins prematurely.
Written by Nick Lepard, “Keeper” is another in a current spat of post-COVID movies that concern a couple moving into a lush cabin and falling apart. Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) and Liz (Tatiana Maslany) have been together a year, and he’s taking her for a getaway to his family place in the woods. Something is not right, and there’s not much mystery as to its source. As in the other recent cabin fever movies, something’s off with the dude. Sutherland, son of Donald — a legacy that the filmmakers are definitely playing with here — infuses Malcolm with the insecure evil cuck vibes that are typical of the genre.
Sutherland takes Malcolm’s insecurities seriously — that’s the first of the movie’s pleasant surprises — allowing us to feel the pathos of a guy who is used to being a nerd and now dating an attractive and intelligent woman who seems to be above his erotic weight class. A movie about a man putting off sex to talk about chocolate cake is a movie that is certainly more in touch with my own middle-aged contours than I care to admit.
The chocolate cake recalls the tainted mousse from “Rosemary’s Baby,” and it sends Liz on a similar voyage of occult paranoia. Malcolm leaves her alone the day after they’ve arrived, and she hallucinates people with plastic bags on their heads and demons with stretchy necks and white and tortured faces. The script is thin but adequate, and Perkins utilizes it as a springboard for eerie folk horror imagery. The woods here have the lush strangeness of a fairy tale, and the monsters aren’t reduced to fake scare gimmickry. The smugness of Perkins’ last few movies has been parred away.
“Keeper” belongs to Maslany, who suggests a less pretentious Jessie Buckley, an association that links this movie to Buckley’s adventures with pitiful men, such as “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” and “Women Talking” and “Men” and even to a certain extent, the rapturously received and utterly unbearable new movie “Hamnet.” (How absurdly starchy are these titles, especially when bound together in one sentence?)
Maslany and Perkins are more playful than their prestige counterparts, offering a moody low-key horror picture for the surprisingly aggressive early stretch of Virginia winter.
“The Mastermind” is now streaming on MUBI, to which you can currently subscribe for roughly the price of two Wawa coffees a month. “Keeper” is now rentable on demand.
