Advertised as an exciting drama about art theft, starring a moody and scruffy Josh O’Connor, Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind does not follow the arc of a typical heist story. 

The film, set in the background of the Vietnam War in 1970, follows James Blaine (J.B.) Mooney, a married father and unemployed carpenter who decides to steal four Arthur Dove paintings from his local art museum to solve his money problems. After the success of his heist, Mooney spends the rest of the movie taking advantage of his class privileges to dodge the authorities, while state repression of anti-Vietnam War protesters escalates violently in the background.

Mooney is the son of a former judge, who languishes in an unremarkable middle-class life on loans from his parents and his wife’s job, while scoffing at the commercial success of a contractor acquaintance for “balancing books, scheduling [jobs], being on the phone.” 

He longs for the previous carefree lifestyle he had as an art school student, free of responsibilities. He has a loving wife and sons, parents who provide opportunity after opportunity, and friends who are willing to harbour him while he runs from the law. Yet Mooney is deeply unsatisfied with the dull stability of his life.

During the introduction and long title card sequence, we see Mooney at the Farmington Museum of Art over the span of multiple days, with only his clothes to show the passage of time. While Mooney sits moodily on the museum benches, yearning for his days at art school, we see shots of art students sketching, smoking, or simply idling around. Mooney prefers to continue visiting the museum and indulging in his nostalgia instead of looking for a job or parenting his children.

Reichardt is renowned for her contributions to slow cinema, a genre dedicated to rejecting the form of sensational narrative that dominates most movie plots. Instead, slow cinema focuses on long, contemplative takes without background music to emphasize the slow, still, lived-in nature of the flow of time. In The Mastermind, Reichardt manages to accomplish the manifesto of slow cinema without losing the attention of the modern viewer in the age of diminished attention spans.

After the success of the heist, Mooney’s high is ruined by his father reminding him of how pointless the theft of the Dove paintings was, as they only hold a little value among niche abstract collectors. 

Mooney only steals those Dove paintings to feel clever, and the only person who is impressed by the heist is his friend from art school, Fred. The only person who would even be able to sell those paintings on the black market would be one of his university teachers, Professor Pruitt, who has a special interest in Dove. Mooney is given every opportunity to smooth things over with the law, even with the disastrous way his heist turned out, but he keeps trying to get away with his theft in service of the nostalgia he has for his carefree art school days.

While this is happening, the unrest in American society due to the American assault on Vietnam plays as part of the background. Viewed as unnecessary by the American public, the war was deeply unpopular. There were widespread campus protests across the country, and rallies were held in major city centres. A Gallup poll from 1969 showed that 55 per cent of Americans surveyed said that sending troops to Vietnam was a mistake. 

In the Mooney family living room, we hear a broadcast over the family radio covering campus protests against the Vietnam War and the prosecution of students. We then see an Uncle Sam recruitment poster at the bus stop that Mooney stages his escape from. 

The haunting presence of the war in the background of the movie, while Mooney is unbothered and primarily concerned with getting away with his crime, is indicative of the privileged classes who are immune to the human costs of war until it incurs a personal cost on their lives.

We see this tension between the war and Mooney’s privilege at its loudest during the climax of the film. Mooney decides to join a rally of anti-war protesters to blend in with the crowd and escape the authorities chasing him. The riot police are shown attacking unarmed civilian protestors brutally with batons. 

Mooney, having blended in with the anti-war protesters, instead of getting away from the authorities, is rounded up and arrested with the other protesters. His wealthy background and social privileges do not help him because, in the eyes of the riot police, he is another disposable protester standing in the way of the state’s imperial war.

The Mastermind is a movie about how the Vietnam War seeped into the fabric of every aspect of American life. Mooney, despite all of his privileges, cannot avoid being swallowed up by the hunger of the war machine. He is not arrested for the art heist he is wanted for, but rather for being mistaken for an anti-war protester. 

Through Reichardt’s slow cinematic oeuvre, we are immersed in the suffocating political environment of the ’70s. The theft of American abstract art in a conservative environment that brutally attacked any innovative opposition to the nationalist imperial project is excellently used as a vehicle by Reichardt to force the viewer to confront an uneasy truth: apathy will not spare you from the brutality of war.