Written by Dilan Fernando

Warning: The following review is of a film that is part of the 2025 Cannes Film Festival and may contain spoilers for The Mastermind. Reader discretion is advised.

There’s a scene about three quarters into Kelly Reichardt’s new film The Mastermind, an introspection of an art thief, where the titular mastermind James Blaine Mooney (Josh O’Connor) disgruntledly tries to get cigarettes from a machine. With frustration, Mooney hits the machine, a chef from the nearby kitchen overhears and barks, “Ay.”, Mooney meekly apologizes before moving over to a seat at the bar. At the bar, Mooney listens to the other bar patrons discuss and argue over their lives before the Vietnam War. The essence of this scene is what Reichardt hopes to mine and examine throughout the film.

During the press conference after the film’s world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, I was fortunate to begin the discussion about the film by asking Kelly Reichardt, “Would you please discuss the theme of identity in the film?” Reichardt’s response, “I think, the character… he’s set, he follows a certain tradition from the period of the late 60s early 70s kind of Hollywood New Wave. Also, characters of sort of the disenchanted, most entitled, white male, people of the world going off to find themselves and having the luxury to do that. So, there’s a lot of room to project onto the character and so some of the identity comes from what you bring to it and some of it maybe in the tradition of a Simenon character. Who sort of puts out his best effort, works as hard as he can and sort of the punchline of course is doom in every case.”

O’Connor’s response, “I sort of think, it’s difficult to talk about the identity of a character that you’ve played because you're playing them. As far as I’m concerned playing Mooney, I think he’s got this brilliant idea and it just goes terribly wrong but it was so close to going incredibly right.” Is the real heist Mooney’s life position in the world? Does he know the stakes and tries to work the odds into his favour? Reichardt lists Jean-Pierre Melville as one of her favourite filmmakers. Melville, whose films have protagonists that are laconic, strategic, analytical professionals, lends the spiritual persona that Reichardt hopes will pass through the Mooney character. However, Reichardt’s banking on the Mooney character’s disillusionment to propel him and the audience throughout the film is effective for about the first forty minutes.

The film set in 1970 in a town in Massachusetts opens with Mooney sitting on a bench in a museum, giving calculating looks to the various artworks being exhibited. Composer Rob Mazurek’s jazzy score sets an antithetical rhythm to the planning of Mooney’s heist as Reichardt photographs the most mundane and ordinary images of the hours of operation in a museum. It’s here that Reichardt tries to disrupt the viewer’s understanding of the formula for a heist film and have them look deeper within Mooney. As the opening credits conclude the museum is closing. Mooney lifts a small figurine from a display, slyly places it into a sunglasses case and slips that into his wife Terri’s (Alana Haim) purse while walking out with his family.

At first, one may see the resemblance Mooney thinks he shares with ‘lifting professionals’ like Roger Duchesne’s Bob Montagné of Bob Le Flambeur (1956), Steve McQueen’s Thomas Crown of The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), Alain Delon’s Corey of Le Cercle Rouge (1970) and Robert Mitchum’s Eddie Coyle of The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973). It’s this delusion that is Mooney’s biggest flaw, however, the film never goes in depth to show how detrimental it is to his rationale. Why? Perhaps, because Reichardt and O’Connor aren’t sure exactly what makes Mooney a compelling character but instead, what they think might make him one. O’Connor’s ineffectual performance of an emotionally distant and oblique character doesn’t work because he lacks a level of charisma that is necessary to lead a film. Had he played to his strengths as a charming yet bumbling sad sack like William H. Macy in Fargo (1996) or Boogie Nights (1997), it could’ve easily been one of the best performances of O’Connor’s career.

Mooney shows he’s a smart individual with great time management skills; balancing home, parents and a thieving career. Mooney’s wife Terri works as an office clerk and they’ve got two sons, young adolescents passively observing all their father does with wandering eyes. Mooney’s relationship with his own parents is interesting. His father is retired Judge Bill Mooney (Bill Camp) whose judicial standing looms over the entire town in Massachusetts. Mooney’s mother Sarah (Hope Davis) is a socialite-type whose relationship to the local museum and her son is intriguing but hardly ever explored, especially when he asks for a loan to feed himself. Reichardt's unfocused approach to the film makes it less entertaining and compelling for the audience to go along for Mooney’s wild ride.

If more emphasis was put on aspects of the character in contrast to their environment it may have been as entertaining a film as The Gambler (1974), whose leading character Axel Freed’s (James Caan) obsession with gambling creates an emotional severing of his relationships with everyone around him and ultimately himself. Mooney has his moments of restrained excitement and obsession when meticulously putting the heist together. As with other films in the heist genre there’s sometimes a tendency to presume the capers success before it’s pulled; the masterminds of which never seem to have contingency plans.

The film tries to gain its footing dealing with the aftermath of Mooney’s caper by trying to focus more on the character’s internalisation, giving way to Reichardt’s signature examination of introverted personalities. With the theme of identity in the film and after Mooney is given the status of ringleader, it’s understandable that this would be an identity he’d like to disassociate himself with, like David Janssen’s Dr. Richard Kimble in the TV Series The Fugitive (1963-1967). No, what the audience is left with is Mooney giving a tour through a hostile world without any imagination on how to succeed. This may be realistic but that’s what documentaries are for. While striving to attain a level of authenticity there’s one anachronistic detail that faults the entire notion.

Mooney, penniless, drifting town to town with the clothes on his back is on the side of a highway hitchhiking. To the surprise of the audience he actually gets a lift from a man who looks conservative enough to know the paranoia around picking up hitchhikers that swept the nation after the Charles Manson murders the previous year. To further this outlandish and far-fetched joke, (if one could consider it black comedy at best) later on, the driver picks up two hippie musicians. During this section of the film which comprises about the remaining hour and twenty minutes I kept thinking about Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy (1969) roughing it in the gritty streets of New York. What else can be said of a film that makes you think of other films to watch instead?

Dilan Fernando graduated with a degree in Communications from Brock University. ”Written sentiments are more poetic than spoken word. Film will always preserve more than digital could ever. Only after a great film experience can one begin to see all that life has to offer.“