Mastermind

If you asked every Kelly Reichardt fan to blindly predict how the auteur would follow the 2022 release of “Showing Up,” nobody would have guessed she’d make an art heist movie set in New England. But watch a few minutes of “The Mastermind” and you’ll see that it’s a Reichardt film in every sense, even if it externally seems like a departure from the themes and locales she usually prefers.

Loosely inspired by a 1970 news story in which an art museum in Worcester, Massachusetts, was robbed while two teenage girls did homework in the gallery, the ironically titled film stars Josh O’Connor as a working-class family man who ruins his life in record time after making the impulsive decision to rip off his own local museum. Unsurprisingly, the film is far more interested in exploring the psyche of O’Connor’s J.B. Mooney than dazzling you with art heist spectacle, and Reichardt’s long, meditative takes pair beautifully with the lonely moments in which Mooney slowly realizes that he can’t go home — and wouldn’t have much waiting for him if he could.

But it’s missing one major common denominator of a Reichardt film: a Pacific Northwestern setting. Save for her 1994 debut “River of Grass” (which was set in her native Florida), and her 2016 masterpiece “Certain Women” (which moved the action a whopping two states over to Montana), all of Reichardt’s previous films have been set in Oregon. But Reichardt, who spends most of her time on the East Coast due to her teaching job at Bard College in upstate New York, was itching for a change of cinematic scenery.

“I wanted to get out of Oregon for a bit and have a new landscape to look at,” Reichardt said during a recent interview with IndieWire. “Being from New York and originally from Florida, Oregon was so unique to me and so inspiring and exciting because it just was so different than flat Miami or New York City, where I lived. So that was all cool. A lot of those stories were written with Jon Raymond, and we built a little world out there to work from. And Oregon’s a really diverse state, so you have forest and desert, and we never really made use of the ocean, but I needed a change. I teach in New York on the East Coast, and I’ve lived on the East Coast for a long time, and suddenly I could sort of see the light of the East Coast, literally the light, feel the difference of it [compared to] the West Coast… You can see something when you spend time away from it.”

“The Mastermind” moved the action to Framingham, Massachusetts, and the original newspaper story that Reichardt found about the Worcester art heist gave her a starting point to explore a story about the tragically dated concept of a small town having its own art museum. The setting catches America at a point of transition between an era of middle-class prosperity and the economic decay that was on the horizon.

“I really wanted to shoot something on the East Coast. And this size of city, the industrial town that has little museum, that the sort of middle class residents are keeping going, that’s Massachusetts to me,” she said. “That happens to be a place where I went to art school. And so that seemed right. And the Worcester Museum robbery with the young girls, that was a good jumping off point.”

The role of Mooney wasn’t written for O’Connor, but Reichardt was inspired to work with him after being drawn to his “timeless face” and meeting him through a mutual friend. There was an instant chemistry on set (along with O’Connor’s co-star Alana Haim, who gives a brilliantly understated performance as Mooney’s fed-up wife trying to hold the family together amid his antics). Reichardt said that shooting “The Mastermind” was the best filmmaking experience of her life (“First Cow” is the runner-up, if you were wondering). The fact that it came after the stressful experience of filming “Showing Up” during the pandemic only added to the joy.

What does a filmmaker like Reichardt, who has spent her entire career making delicate, unapologetically uncommercial films, think about the current indie film landscape? The auteur is as stressed as any of us, but she’s not convinced that it was ever much better.

“It always feels precarious, and it feels precarious now. I mean, AI is a threat on every level. That makes life feel precarious, much less filmmaking,” she said. “Who’s going to keep financing films? When you’re putting a film out, you have to compete in this realm with films that are just cranking in so much money that it just makes the smallest film so expensive. But I have to say that’s been the story of independent filmmaking since I started. And somehow, here we are. But I don’t know, to be honest, the whole world seems so precarious. I mean, the state of independent filmmaking is probably not our biggest problem. But obviously I care because that’s what I’m into, and I hope it keeps going. But I kind of always have a feeling when I’m making a film like, ‘Well, this is probably the last one. Can’t believe we’re getting another one done.’”

Reichardt might enjoy a bit of gallows humor about her own career longevity, but she’s hoping that “The Mastermind” isn’t anything close to her last film. She doesn’t need filmmaking — her day job as a teacher is a lot less stressful — but Reichardt said that she has enough film ideas to keep her band of repeat collaborators like cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt, assistant director Chris Carroll, and production designer Anthony Gasparro busy for the rest of their lives.

“I mean, it’s a lot easier to teach than to make films, to be honest,” she said with a laugh. “Filmmaking is super, super challenging. I mean, just as far as the craftsmanship of it, of shooting and editing. And just the idea of visual storytelling is forever interesting to me. And I don’t think I could accomplish it all in one lifetime. I don’t know, you choke, you get better at things. But new challenges bring new trials. And yeah, oh, my God, we still have, if we’re allowed, we have lots we’d like to do.”

A MUBI release, “The Mastermind” is now playing in theaters.