There is a specific kind of man that The Mastermind is interested in: the kind who looks at a sleeping security guard and an unlocked drawer and concludes that the hard part is already behind him. James Blaine Mooney is not a criminal mastermind. He is an unemployed father and husband who has been told too many times that he is a disappointment, and has decided that stealing paintings from an art museum is the most reasonable available response. The film follows his plan from its naive inception to its quietly humiliating conclusion with the patient, detail-oriented precision that director Kelly Reichardt has made her signature.
The Mastermind examines the egocentric nature of an overconfident character who believes himself to be the hero of a heist film, even though he doesn’t have the foresight to know what to do in an intense scenario. What James never accounts for is the fundamental truth that plans involving other people are only as reliable as those people, and the people James involves are not reliable. Partners bail. A third collaborator gets caught and talks. Disputes over money fracture alliances that were never particularly solid to begin with. The paintings end up somewhere less than safe. Each complication arrives not as dramatic escalation but as the inevitable consequence of a man who mistook the absence of visible obstacles for the presence of a workable plan.
His crimes are motivated by a desire to do something with his life, as he’s constantly told that he’s a disappointing son and an absent father. That motivation surfaces most clearly in the film’s most emotionally concentrated moment: a phone call where James tells his wife that everything he did was for the family. It is the only time genuine feeling breaks through the surface of a film that otherwise keeps its emotional temperature deliberately low, and it lands with weight precisely because the film has withheld it so carefully.
The ending is the film’s most quietly ironic gesture. James has navigated genuinely dangerous situations with his characteristic combination of obliviousness and luck, only to be caught during a protest; not because of anything connected to the paintings or the plan, but because he drops a wallet he has just stolen and a well-meaning stranger returns it. The law finally catches him not through investigation or cleverness but through a basic act of human decency. The universe, it turns out, has a sense of humor.
Josh O’Connor is perfectly cast. His character’s nonchalant, casual, and pathetic persona is compelling largely due to the actor’s commitment to the bit. Despite his aloof nature, you become invested in his life. O’Connor finds the naivety and the hopefulness in James without ever making him sympathetic in a way that lets him off the hook. You understand him completely. You also watch him fail completely. Both things are true simultaneously, which is the most honest thing the film does.
Reichardt’s direction lingers deliberately on scenes, holding shots longer than comfort allows, letting silence do the work that dialogue declines to do. The result is a film that is slow in the way that certain truths are slow, arriving at their conclusions without urgency, because the outcome was always inevitable. As a real depiction of a very ordinary kind of failure, it is precise and occasionally funny. As a film that demands emotional investment, it keeps its audience at arm’s length by design, which is both its defining quality and the reason three stars feels exactly right.
The mastermind was neither a master nor particularly mindful. The Mastermind knows this, and so do we, almost immediately. The film’s quiet pleasure is in watching James figure it out for himself.