On DVD: "The Mastermind"

To the freewheeling mobility of the American independent cinema, Kelly Reichardt has introduced complication and obstruction in a series of droll anti-thrillers that also functioned as lucid, probing character studies. (The Kelly Reichardt Obstructions would be a fine title for any monograph.) In her 1994 debut River of Grass, the lovers on the run didn't - and couldn't - get very far; her 2010 Western Meek's Cutoff stranded its characters in the middle of nowhere; 2013's Night Moves centred on system-smashing anarchists who, in succumbing to their own paranoia, couldn't follow through on their own best intentions. Things ain't easy in a Kelly Reichardt film - another monograph title there, perhaps - and her characters have a tendency to make life doubly difficult for themselves. The Mastermind - its title as ironic as you like - bears down on another of this director's drifters, a non-complimentary term in this instance, as the film's anti-hero is someone who really should have gained some sort of direction by the point we find him: thirtysomething deadbeat JB Mooney (Josh O'Connor), who's forsaken steady employment and responsible parenting in order to plot a heist on a provincial art museum. By complete coincidence, Reichardt's previous film, 2022's Showing Up, concerned the trials and tribulations of a working artist; here, by contrast, is someone aiming to get rich quick without putting in the hours, a career criminal for the age of A.I.. In the non-Reichardt version of this story, Mooney pulls it together in tense setpieces and redeems himself in the process, possibly even reuniting with his estranged family. In the Reichardt version, however, he messes up again: he just about gets the heist done - in the clumsiest, most half-assed way imaginable - but then falls to pieces, leaving JB Mooney with and as a big nothing.

So there's already a major caveat here: you will need to know what this filmmaker is getting at (and has long been getting at) in order to even partly vibe with it. (Were you to stick it on expecting another Thomas Crown Affair, you would likely be wholly underwhelmed: save your money for Michael B. Jordan's upcoming remake.) The perverse fun of The Mastermind instead lies in watching Josh O'Connor potter around aimlessly. This proves a markedly different pleasure from watching O'Connor in the recent Wake Up Dead Man, where his character was altogether more focused and purposeful under his cassock: that guy had the Lord in his heart. God only knows what JB Mooney's deal is. (I'm not sure even he knows beyond a certain point, though Reichardt floats the intriguing possibility that this lawbreaking may be Mooney's delayed adolescent rebellion against his father, a senior judge.) Time and again, this camera emphasises the physical aspect of the protagonist's pottering. A long stretch either side of the midpoint reframes Mooney as akin to a small woodland creature - a weasel, possibly - squirrelling his ill-gotten gains away for the winter while kicking soil over his own mess. It's a funny if somewhat deflating and anticlimactic gag that absolutely no good comes from all this huffing and puffing: like the lovers in River of Grass, Mooney doesn't get very far, either. (Not least as there are wilier predators on this trail.) Is there too much pottering, not enough plot? Almost certainly. And I couldn't quite shake the thought that Reichardt has paced similar mean streets before, albeit with the less saleable Larry Fessenden in the lead role. But The Mastermind is finally very indie in the old, oppositional sense of the word: what Reichardt means to say is that there is another way of looking at and telling these stories, and that the kinds of men our crime fictions lionise aren't always as aspirational as they appear.

The Mastermind is available on DVD through MUBI from Monday, and available to stream via MUBI.