Cannes 2025 Review: At Cannes, ‘The Mastermind’ Said the Unspoken
Fittingly, Kelly Reichardt's Cannes-closer is a portrait of a power-keg period of history glimpsed from the periphery, and a wry, withering film about living without integrity in an era that demands it.
Attending the Cannes Film Festival — like many things right now — is a dissonant experience. In between the buzzy back-to-back screenings, star-studded events, and myriad other shiny distractions this year, there were harrowing news headlines to be read that made all this focus on celebrity feel obscene, knowing a genocide was raging, virtually unobstructed, on the other side of the world.
Reality did find ways to pierce through at Cannes this year: the festival and its offshoots programmed films by and about Palestinians (Once Upon a Time in Gaza, Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk), and there were vigils to attend and bubble-bursting press conference questions to be witnessed. Though some films chosen for the festival’s Official Competition did offer powerful reminders of pressing moral issues — Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident tackled repression in Iran with scalding directness, and Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling trained its unsparing gaze on the generational cycles of sexual abuse taking place in one German farmhouse — few others addressed the underlying tension at the heart of the festival and events like it. One film that did speak the unspoken in its own quiet way was the very last Competition film to premiere: Kelly Reichardt’s art heist movie The Mastermind.
That description might seem odd: Reichardt, who favours a “slow cinema” style, has never made a film that could be compared to the likes of Entrapment or The Thomas Crown Affair before. And she still hasn’t: The Mastermind’s art heist is decidedly unglamorous (farcical, even) and told in the same patiently plotted, poetic manner of all of her movies. Set in 1970 — the year US troops entered Cambodia, the year of the Kent State shootings — The Mastermind is no thriller, but a portrait of a power-keg period of history glimpsed from the periphery, and a wry, withering film about living without integrity in an era that demands it.
Josh O’Connor subverts his natural charm to play The Mastermind‘s cringingly pathetic JB Mooney, whom we first meet moving through a Massachusetts art museum with a concertedly breezy air. Only the shrewd gaze of Christopher Blauvelt’s camera lets us into what the museum’s dozing security guards and blissfully unaware visitors miss: that JB has his hands under the glass of one of the displays and is silently pocketing toy figurines as part of a trial run for a bigger theft he’s planning.
Later, we’ll learn that JB is the art school dropout son of a local judge (Bill Camp), two biographical details that account for the hubris and specificity of his current vocation. His parents, though, believe he’s an out-of-luck carpenter; in a scene you can sense has played out many times before, his mother (Hope Davis) reluctantly agrees to put up the seed money for a promising new furniture commission he’s undertaking (in fact, this is the cash he needs to hook accomplices for his next heist). JB’s put-upon wife Terri (Alana Haim, appropriately low-key) is less credulous, but too exhausted by the business of raising their boys, running their home, and working an actual job to really confront him.
In virtually very scene, Reichardt and her collaborators have designed the film’s form and content to emphasise just how much of a loser JB is. There are the little details, like the fact that we see him slobbing around the house in boxers almost as much as we see him in anything else. And there are the repeated emphases on the irony of the film’s title, like when his getaway driver bails on their planned theft of some of (real-life abstract artist) Arthur Dove’s paintings at the last moment, and JB is unable to muster more than an indignant whine at the betrayal — a far cry from any of the slick heist architects we’re used to seeing on screen.
When the robbery itself takes place, it’s beset by farcical hiccup after hiccup, but interestingly, Reichardt suggests that it’s not just JB’s incompetence that’s to blame — there may be something almost cosmic behind all this bad luck. For example, in one long, laborious night-time scene, we watch as he struggles to stash the (eventually stolen) artwork in the rafters of a barn while pigs snuffle noisily down below. Each of the protracted scene’s seconds underlines JB’s ineptitude, but when the ladder he used to climb up topples over, leaving him stuck, it feels like the universe speaking directly to him: things aren’t going to go the way you want them to.
And nor do we want them to: again and again, The Mastermind reminds us of JB’s fundamental uselessness as a father, husband, and — more devastatingly — simply a person in the world. At home, he’s totally averse to responsibility, and what moments of apparent sincerity he does have with Terri and their boys are nearly always revealed to be hollow. When the police interview him about the theft and Terri begins to suspect what he’s done, he can’t even bring himself to feign regret for too long before he’s tripping over himself to pack a bag for her and the kids to get them out from under his feet. The most honest he gets with her is when he professes his devotion to their family — “Everything I’ve done has been for you and the kids” — and then immediately qualifies it: “And me, yeah, true enough… Three-quarters of what I’ve done was for you.“
Reichardt’s assessment of JB beyond his failures at home is even more savage. Whether it’s passing shots of anti-war protests, snatches of overheard conversations between soldiers on leave, or TV news blaring in the background of a scene, Reichardt (who also wrote and edited the movie) is always reorienting our attention with gentle firmness to the film’s historical context. In an eerily resonant moment, a news anchor talks about a university preferring silence in the aftermath of a campus protest clash while JB looks on; later, a newsreel of US troops entering Cambodia plays while he’s forging a passport on the lam, the staccato pop of bullets sounding out a stinging commentary on his situation. In another telling moment, a friend (John Magaro) suggests he hop the border and hide out in a Canadian commune of “draft dodgers, radical feminists, and dope fiends,” but JB demurs (“Not my scene”). You get the sense that it’s probably not the latter group that’s putting him off — it’s just that that might sound like too much integrity in one place for him.
The Mastermind is a sideways look at history, but never a side-lining one. Reichardt’s constant juxtaposition of JB’s total passivity in the face of a national moral crisis speaks volumes, particularly in the final scene — a scathingly ironic ending that snaps the film’s backdrop squarely into full focus. Watching it on the last day of Cannes, it was impossible not to appreciate the extratextual aptness of the film, a bitterly fitting closer to a festival that, like The Mastermind itself, largely felt like an off-centre look at an urgent moment in history.