MIFF 2025 | ‘The Mastermind’ review: Smart but meandering genre deconstruction
Despite its technical competence, Kelly Reichardt’s parable against upper-class hubris is as aimless as its leading man’s thousand-yard stare.
Josh O’Connor in “The Mastermind.” Photo courtesy of MUBI.
To dream of “bigger and better things” is a most common, and also arguably, a most American sentiment. It is also a most corruptible aspiration; commonly curdled by the shortcomings of the dreamer themselves: a lack of foresight, perhaps, or an innate restlessness instilled by the privilege of bourgeois ignorance; a refusal to settle for “less” even though “more” is nothing but an unknowable, indescribable delusion.
It is this strange and easily deluded sentiment that drives “The Mastermind,” Kelly Reichardt’s quietly scathing study of white upper-class malaise and the selfishness that inevitably accompanies it. Here, Reichardt’s new filmic parable centers on James “J.B.” Mooney, the unemployed son of a court judge who whiles away his days in the rich and rarefied streets of small-town Massachusetts. Mooney has it all — a nuclear family, a wife and two sons, ageing yet supportive parents; the dictionary definition of the white picket fence dream. And yet, at the start of the film, we find him in the autumn of his discontent, sloping through the Framingham Museum of Art with the intent to plan and pull off an art heist that will propel him out of his bucolic yet banal life, towards that still-indescribable horizon of “bigger and better.” Such hubris, coming from such an aimless, adrift man, undoubtedly has a price.
While “The Mastermind” arguably still counts as a heist film, Reichardt’s writer-directorial eye is deeply uninterested in mimicking any of the genre’s most notable hallmarks — which is, admittedly, to be expected from a director hailed as one of the giants of modern American slow cinema. None of the pomp and circumstance of “American Animals” or, god forbid, “Ocean’s Eleven” is to be found here, and Mooney is certainly no charismatic antihero. Fittingly brought to life by indie darling Josh O’Connor, he is quiet, meek, and almost startlingly unremarkable. As a performer, O’Connor does not flinch away from Reichardt’s keen directorial eye — rather, he seems to thrive under her unrelenting gaze, and to describe “The Mastermind” as a Josh O’Connor vehicle above all things would certainly not be incorrect. But for all his competence, one can’t help but also wonder if he is simply going through the motions at times; mindlessly re-hashing his crumpled, navel-gazing performance from Alice Rohrwacher’s “La Chimera,” once more with (a little less) feeling.
This isn’t helped by the fact that, while Reichardt’s observational powers are as keen as ever, her writing on “The Mastermind” feels lacking at times. O’Connor’s supporting cast are mostly relegated to the role of glorified extras; their characters never given the chance to become more than paper-thin silhouettes. This is especially disappointing in the case of Alana Haim, whose electric charisma in Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Licorice Pizza” feels wasted in the role of Mooney’s beleaguered wife Terri, who gets less than a collective five minutes of screen time and is barely allowed to emote in front of the camera. Mooney’s sons briefly take on comic relief roles only to disappear completely from the runtime’s second half; any love between them and their father never quite feeling palpable enough to fully drive home the film’s damning final indictment of Mooney’s selfishness.
As a whole, “The Mastermind” is a whip-smart deconstruction of the heist genre in service of a parable that is neither finger-wagging nor overly moralistic. However, when paired with Reichardt’s signature malingering directorial scrutiny, sitting through “The Mastermind” can at times feel as painfully aimless and plodding as Mooney’s own hapless drifting through the unravelling of his own life. With Reichardt’s other deconstructive genre piece, “Night Moves,” the act of observation was meant to be tiresome; to whittle away its viewers’ resolves in the same manner that the gritty futility of environmental activism wears down even its most dedicated soldiers. With “The Mastermind,” the fatiguing effect of Reichardt’s acute observational style never quite feels justified by the message behind her cautionary tale, which is already crystal clear before too long. Do we really need to watch O’Connor stare off into the middle distance for as long, and as often, as we are made to? One is inclined, by the end of the film’s almost two hours of runtime, to say no.
