Most caper movies tend to focus on the elaborate logistics of a theft – typically of an outlandishly colossal haul or priceless artefact (think Ocean’s Eleven or The Italian Job). In contrast, their close cousin, the heist film, focuses less on the mechanics of the crime and more on its invariably destructive human consequences (such as in Heat or The Town).
While The Mastermind falls firmly into the latter camp, writer-director Kelly Reichardt dials down the genre’s hard-boiled violence and tension in favour of a downbeat, compassionately ironic character study.
It’s bleak early 1970 in the small Massachusetts city of Farmington. President Nixon has just invaded Cambodia and the US is being torn apart by the Vietnam war. But art school dropout James (Josh O’Connor) has only one, almost solipsistically close-to-hand “cause”. He plans to escape the hand-to-mouth tedium of his life as a jobbing interior decorator by lifting four abstract canvases from the local museum.
