If you asked each Kelly Reichardt hell to blindly predict how the auteur would follow the 2022 release of “Showing off”, no one would have guessed that she would make a contrived film set in New England. But watch a few minutes of “The Mastermind” and you will see that it is a Reichardt film in every way, even if from the outside it 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 were doing 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 demolish his own local museum. Unsurprisingly, the film is far more interested in exploring the psyche of O’Connor’s JB Mooney than dazzling you with contrived spectacle, and Reichardt’s long, meditative lines 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.
But there is one major common denominator missing from a Reichardt film: a Pacific Northwestern setting. Except for her 1994 debut “River of Grass” (which was set in her native Florida) and her 2016 masterpiece “Certain Women” (which moved the action across two states to Montana), all of Reichardt’s previous films have been set in Oregon. But Reichardt, who spends most of his time on the East Coast because of his teaching job at Bard College in upstate New York, longed for a change of scenery.
“I wanted to get out of Oregon for a while 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 was just so different from flat Miami or New York City, where I lived. So that was cool. A lot of these stories were written with Jon Raymond, and we built a little world out there to work from. And Oregon is a very diverse state, so you have forest and desert, but I really needed a sea change, but I needed indeed a change. New York on the East Coast, and I’ve lived on the East Coast for a long time, and suddenly I could kind 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, Mass., and the original newspaper story Reichardt found about the construction plot in Worcester 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 captures America at a transition point 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 town, industrial town that has a little bit of a museum, that kind of middle class people keep going, that’s Massachusetts to me,” she said. “It happens to be a place where I went to art school. And so it seemed right. And the robbery at the Worcester Museum with the young girls, that was a good starting point.”
The role of Mooney was not 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 instant chemistry on set (along with O’Connor’s co-star Alana Haim, who gives a brilliantly understated performance as Mooney’s jaded wife trying to keep the family together amid his antics). Reichardt said that filming “The Mastermind” was the best filming experience of her life (“First Cow” is the second, in case 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 his entire career making sensitive, relentlessly non-commercial films, think about the current indie film landscape? The author is as stressed as any of us, but she is not convinced that it has ever been much better.
“It always feels unsafe, and it feels unsafe now. I mean, AI is a threat on every level. It makes life feel unsafe, much less filmmaking,” she said. “Who’s going to continue to finance films? When you release a film, you have to compete in this realm of films that only bring 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, I think the whole world of filmmaking is uncertain. not our biggest problem but obviously I care because that’s what I like, and I hope it continues. But I kind of always have a feeling when I make a film like: ‘Well, this is probably the last one. Can’t believe we’re getting another one done.’”
Reichardt can enjoy some gallows humor about the longevity of her own career, but she hopes “The Mastermind” is nowhere near her last film. She doesn’t needs filmmaking — her day job as a teacher is much less stressful — but Reichardt said she has enough film ideas to keep her band of returning collaborators such as 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 movies, to be honest,” she said with a laugh. “Filmmaking is super, super challenging. I mean, just the craft of it, filming and editing. And just the idea of visual storytelling is always interesting to me. And I don’t think I could accomplish it all in a lifetime. I don’t know, you choke, you get better at things. But new challenges, oh, God, we still have trials. granted, we have a lot we’d like to do.”
A MUBI release, “The Mastermind” is now in theaters.
