The Mastermind (2025)
The Mastermind: A Scathingly Funny Portrait of America
Benji and Luke start their conversation about The Mastermind by describing their familiarity with director Kelly Reichardt's films and her history as a hero of American slow cinema.
They then provide background and details about Reichardt's creative collaborators and the logline for The Mastermind before diving deep into the moments from the movie including themes, ideas, and thoughts from the audience at their screening.
Finally, they wrap up the episode with their overall thoughts on The Mastermind and Benji compares it to Reichardt's 2010 film, Meek's Cutoff.
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The Mastermind (2025) — All Those Moments
Full episode transcript. Automated transcription errors may remain.
A bumbling Yankee dork fails son with a family, mistaking upper class privilege for existential dread, plans and executes a truly low ambition art heist, seemingly just to feel something. Despite very little being stacked against him, our hero still manages to botch the whole thing spectacularly, blowing up the life he never really seemed to care about in the first place. The movie is called The Mastermind. This podcast is called All Those Moments. I'm Benji Wade.
And I'm Luke Baumgarten. Happy Halloween.
dude.
Time.
All those moments is a podcast built around connecting social, political, or cultural moments with moments from our favorite movies. Luke, first of all, happy Halloween. Happy Halloween, Meggie. I keep having to remind myself that it's Halloween. It snuck up on us too. I don't even know if we have candy yet, so I might be running some of the errands the character the main character in this movie would never dream of doing for his family. I might have to go do for mine right after this. Yeah, like going trick-or-treating with my kids later this afternoon. Luke, I will start by just telling you that.
The mastermind is now one of my favorites. And I don't just mean within the context of doing this podcast with you. I feel like I'm being shot out of a cannon doing this episode because I think I even sent you a message yesterday that I haven't even explained the context of it, where I was just kind of like, I'm overwhelmed. And you and I have known each other long enough to where I could kind of count on that you had a response to that of like, I don't even want to hear it. That is exactly my response. You you didn't say anything. And I'm overwhelmed, honestly, with joy. I just at the film.
At the film, thinking about Kelly Reichardt's movies, about like, you know, just everything about this particular movie and the things that are contained within it, all the details, it is a lot to explore and unpack. And yeah, I think not just for this podcast, but overall, this is one of my favorite ever movies. Wow. Yeah, I I really loved it too. I haven't thought about where it sits in my Pantheon, but I have I have been thinking about it so much and not just because I had to write out the plot for this episode. It
keeps coming back to me in ways it kind of sneaks up on me, much like the, you know, sort of slow cinema kind of does. Do you know Kelly Reichardt movies? None. This is my first. I am a person who would have always told you if you had asked me, yeah, Kelly Reichardt's she's incredible. She's one of the best living American filmmakers, whatever, without really knowing. It because only because I will say that I had one really key receipt.
Her movie Old Joy, which came out in two thousand six, I considered a masterpiece. We even brought this up in our conversation with Carson Lund when we were doing that interview. I wanna start by just describing something that's kind of funny that's happening with the mastermind. So are you familiar with this whole thing that the AMC like regal chains do with movies where they do a surprise screening?
I've heard of the surprise screenings. I didn't hear about it in in context of this. It's either cheap or free. Yeah, but you and you don't know what the movie's gonna be. I think they call it Screen Unseen with AMC. You don't know what the movie's gonna be until you're sitting down. So the mastermind was the one that they did for this last month. And I have to admit to you, speaking of solo cinema, it's a very, very risky choice to do a Kelly Redcart movie for that one you as you were even just setting this up, I was like, that is a yeah.
Absolutely. And for a lot of people, I think, from one particular screening I heard about, they were not expecting a movie like this and they were confused and like some people walked out, whatever. But we started this podcast with a slow cinema. I called it a slow cinema masterpiece when doing a description for YouTube, Ephus. That's slow cinema. Observational, contemplative movies where you really climb inside the character's headspace through long takes, through lots of examples of like process and activities and
Sometimes there's no dialogue, you'll just be seeing a character working something out. And you have to interpret sometimes minimal actions from characters to feel like what what's going through the head of this character that I'm I'm witnessing. They don't really do like voice over narration or anything either. It doesn't seem like it gives you this opportunity for slowly over time the psyche of whatever that character that you're observing or the characters, you are invested.
You end up it feels like you take on, you get kind of stitched into their atmosphere. So when they have something happen, if there's like a moment of catharsis or purgation or whatever, it you really feel it as the viewer. It's one of the the things that can really pay off. Right. And by the Reichardt is one of the best to ever do it. If that character doesn't have a moment of catharsis or purgation or any sort of change at all, it can make you like angry the way a parent might be or something at the character who's Yeah, because you might want to you you sort of root for them.
And you feel invested in them because this filmmaker is is kind of putting you in a position to I'm gonna make you hang in. Yeah. And so you a choice. Yeah. And it can be unsettling. And honestly, let me say this is another reason. So let me just own my own ADHD bias here. I think I probably have avoided really slow movies like this, but I think like I don't know if I think I have the attention for this stuff sometimes where I'm just like I get impatient and I'll just like jump on my phone. So seeing this type of movie in a theater actually
sort of forces through social pressure me to just be like, okay, sit with this movie the way the director intended, be a big boy and like don't reach for your phone because you're a little uncomfortable. I look, I mean, we're all learning and growing here, Benji, except for the main character of this film. Like I actually really like that. This is one of the most agonizing two, three, four, five. How long did it even last? I don't even know. Time dilated to the point where it's like, this could have been an hour of my life. Yeah. It was so uncomfortable for me. Yeah. and the payoff was great.
It's this is such a great way to like orient the audience and our and our conversation to what we're doing here because we've talked a lot on our podcast about the discomfort that people have watching frankly any movie now. Yeah. There's a clip running around. there's a bunch of different conversations, I should say, that are being had about second screen viewing. Yeah. This idea of watching a movie and screenwriters changing their scripts.
To accommodate executive producers telling screenwriters to accomp change their scripts to accommodate the fact that this is going to be viewed mostly on Netflix. With a person doing this while watch with a cell phone in their hand while they watch a movie, so that you have to make your screenwriting extremely didactic and your plot points really heavy handed. Yeah. So that you don't lose the attention of your viewer. It's all also in conversation with this thing that we've been talking about with like the discomfort that
What our phones are so good at doing is addressing our discomfort. Easing discomfort. Yeah. Easing discomfort. Anytime you feel a little uncomfortable with your own thoughts or whatever's going on around you, just pick up your phone. And I can't think of a more uncomfortable scenario. We're talking about the mastermind and the main character whose name's JB. We're gonna get into it. But watching this character was excruciatingly uncomfortable at times. So anyway, do you have anything more you wanna say about the this being your first Reichardt movie, maybe?
Her camera work, I don't know another way to describe it other than this, just like quiet. It's like really quiet. And it's like, but also kind of unblinking. This type of observational slow cinema stuff is completely my shit. And when I was a film student, I wanted to do these super long takes where this character is like walking down a sidewalk, eating a bag of chips and then looking for like a delivery of
some a package from the UPS driver or whatever. And I just really wanted to just spend all this time in this dude's headspace. And I had a 27 minute edit of a short. I that I ended up editing that thing down to like 11 minutes. Honestly, just because I got shamed by the film faculty at Montana State University. Yeah. Or my friends who were like, I'm so bored by this. And I was like, I wish I'd been going to Bard College
With Kelly Reichardt as my teacher. Where she teaches, yeah. Where she teaches. Okay. And I wish she had been my teacher because she would have like, Fucking go for it. Show that. Show the entire time that he's waiting for the UPS driver on the morning that he's waiting for the UPS driver.
All right, let's get into talking about the movie Luke. What is this movie? The Mastermind is the ninth feature film from Kelly Reichardt. Her first feature was made thirty years ago. It was called A River of Grass, and it's also the only movie that she did not edit. and just for context, I would say that it is unusual for a director to edit their own work.
but more common probably in the genre of slow cinema for all the reasons we've just described. And not just because these built these movies probably have small budgets 'cause they aren't like blockbusters, it's not Spielberg. But also like you would want control of the like wouldn't editing be really important to a director who's thinking about compositions the way
Exactly. If you would have passed that student film off to one of your classmates to do the edit, it would have been an eleven minute movie from the start, or maybe five minutes from the I was just gonna say it would have been a three minute movie. Okay. But like think Carson Lund. Carson Lund edited Ephis. Yeah. Reichardt has also received writing credits on all but one of her movies. That movie was Meek's Cutoff, which we'll come back to. Six of Reichardt's movies, including Meek's Cutoff, were adaptations of short stories or novels by novelist slash screenwriter Jonathan Raymond, who also blew who, like Kelly Reichardt, lives in
Oregon. with Mastermind, Reichardt was also interested in historic examples of art thefts, art heists, including the nineteen seventy-two robbery of the Worcester Art Museum, which I know you have thoughts about. We will come back to. I will say I watched two of Kelly Reichardt's movies this week, Meek's Cutoff and First Cow, both written by Jonathan Raymond. we're gonna talk about First Cow a lot on the episode we do on Train Dreams, which will be our next episode because there's a
There's a like direct relationship between those two texts. Meek's cutoff will I'll come back to at the very end of this episode. This is the fourth Reichardt movie that includes the work of production designer Anthony Gasparro. interesting. Knowing that this movie was very likely working with a modest budget. holy shit, the production value of the design. Even a 1970s era period piece, I don't know how you pull that off on these kinds of budgets. No, no. Just like even having old enough cars to
populate street with. Like how do you how do you even pull that off? I wish we had got a chance to have Kelly Reichardt on the podcast to make a long story short for our viewer. We had a kind of inside track through a connection of ours. Yeah. But Kelly Reichardt reported back to us that MUBI, who paid for this movie and is distributing it now, packed her schedule and she does not have any room. I'm still going to try to get Kelly Reichardt to come on our podcast at some point because I would absolutely love to talk with her. But honestly, I will be completely starstruck.
but yeah, stunningly immersive world building in 1970s New England in this movie and later the Midwest. First Cow, another movie that was production designed by Anthony Gasparro, was also incredibly impressive. And again, for a small budget. This is the fifth Reich art movie with cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt, and he shot the hell out of this movie at least five times while watching this movie. I was like, cinematography, holy shit.
Everything is so stunning. Everything is so immaculately framed and composed. There's so much pinnacle of filmmaking craft in this movie, in probably every one of her movies. I'm going to make sure that I'm a Kelly Reichardt completionist quite soon. This movie is absolutely in direct conversation with the rest of her filmography, but let's stop there. Let's get into it. Starting with the log line for Kelly Reichardt's 2025 movie, The Mastermind, here is how it's described on the internets.
In a sedate corner of Massachusetts, circa 1970, an unemployed carpenter turned amateur art thief named JB Mooney, played by Josh O’Connor, plans his first big heist. With his local museum cased and accomplices recruited, JB has an airtight plan, or so he thinks, and I guess you would say so the audience thinks. Kind of? I don't know. Kind of. Yeah, there's probably an asterisk there. When things go haywire, his life unravels and we get an up
Close view of the folly of man. The Mastermind also features Alana Haim as JB's wife, Terry, Gaby Hoffmann and John Magaro as JB's longtime friends, Maude and Fred, and the inimitable Hope Davis and Bill Camp as JB's parents. Also, quick shout out to the real life brothers, Sterling and Jasper Thompson, who play the two sons of JB Mooney. Those poor kids. Yeah. I hope they didn't get any trauma from Carl and Tommy.
Rich in textured detail, this slide depiction of an era subverts long-held illusions and confronts disillusionment. Okay, Luke, we're gonna do our moments from this movie a little differently. Again, we're building this thing as we drive it. We're going to describe the moments from the movie that includes some feedback from our audience that we watch the movie with. Right. Okay. So it's gonna be kind of a breakdown of scenes that start in the very beginning through the end.
And then there will be spoilers. So this is the part of the podcast. That's why we w we wanted to do the kind of generic log line. Pretty soon, we're going to tell you what happens in this movie. So this is a podcast. Let's be honest. You should probably watch these movies before listening to all those moments. Cause this is a we do some pretty interesting textual analysis, some meta textual analysis, some intertextual analysis. And we're gonna go deep into this movie. So Luke is gonna walk us through like what happens in this movie, and we'll share all of our moments with our audience.
So yeah, the film opens at the dawn of that most sepia-toned of decades, not when sepia film was created in the Western era, but the nineteen seventies, when everybody decided we wanted to go from psychedelic colors back to shades of brown. we meet James Blaine, JB to his friends, although it's unclear how many actual friends he has. Mooney with his wife Terry, played by Alana Haim, and two kids taking in the sights at a small provincial museum.
identifies it as Framingham Art Gallery. So robbing the Framingham Art Museum would be like robbing a like small suburban communities, like community library or something. So this was inspired by an actual heist. I think a lot of her work is inspired by real happenings that were happening. Vietnam War is a backdrop of this movie. But at every level she consciously sort of ramps down the difficulty level for her character here and ramps down sort of the stakes a little bit.
He's not aspiring to rob the, you know, the Louvre, which just got knocked over in France. He's aspiring to basically rob his community museum. I think what you're describing ends up intensifying the kind of judgment that the
Storytelling makes about this character. The fact that it is such a tiny absolutely did you say provincial? provincial. Exactly. So the kids are running around, Terry's strolling. JB is looking very conspicuously, like he's not trying to be conspicuously casing the joint. Like he's looking really close at the art. And you're like, does he just really love art? No, he's like kind of subtly peeking behind the frame to see if there's any sort of alarm system or wiring. And then he does rob the place just a little as a treat.
Pulling like it looked like it must have been like a revolutionary war figurine out of a miniature face. He sort of palms it like, is this guy like a a pickpocket, like a master thief or whatever? At this point, Kelly Reichardt has already introduced like he's looking at the security guard too before he takes this little miniature. Yeah. So that there's you get some indication, but back to your point about how And the the security guard is always asleep. Always asleep. Like not only is he not
Pay attention, he's or he's looking in the wrong direction or whatever. He's just not conscious. Yeah. You don't actually know the relationship of him to the kid. The camera travels through and follows this kind of that's true, yeah, precocious, preteen kid who seems like he might even be on the spectrum. He's a little bit yeah, he's citing a bunch of information about the art that they're looking at. It turns out it's revealed because he sits down, the JB character sits down next to them to as they're talking about art that he's
That kid's dad. I think that's one of the things that's so fascinating about what how she unpacks Reichardt unpacks the family dynamic here. Is this first scene, he's clearly looking like he's casing the place, but it's not immediately clear if Alana Haim's character no is like part of it, if she's like engaging in a little, you know, sort of white collar crime with him or s whatever. And the kids seem pretty well adjusted. This kid obviously is curious about the museum. He's talking about facts from the museum. So like maybe this is kind of like
A happy American couple in in kind of a late mid century. Well the and the fact that that his behavior, the JB character's behavior begins the movie the way that it does, already speaks to the fact that he's performing the role of not dad. I'm the whole thing. I'm not a dad, I'm not a husband, I'm this kind of
he seems like he might be appreciating the art, but to the point you're making, and of course which leads to him taking this miniature, right? It's like he's got he's up to no good. Yeah. We quickly realize JB has much bigger but still relatively small ambitions to pull a bigger job at this art gallery. He wants to d steal a small clutch of paintings by a specific
painter Arthur Dove, who is a real artist who's sometimes credited with being called America's first abstract painter. He died in like 1948. He was doing his like I think the height of his career was, you know, around World War One. You get a sense that those are the there's like four of these paintings and those are the only truly valuable things in this museum.
And they aren't like Monet level valuable. They are but they are. It is an important American artist. Pretty quickly the jazz music is introduced. Yeah. And what I from the beginning, kind of right? From the beginning. In the scene where he's casing the museum. And I felt like it did a very effective job of matching the pose of Josh O’Connor as he's moving slowly through the gallery. And it's the first time that I see the outline of the character Michel from
Robert Bresson's pickpocket. Except there's like something off about him. This is long before I realized that A, he's the dad of the kid and that he's also a total moron. But at this point, you're kind of like, I don't know if you had the impression I did, but the jazz music, the fact that he's performing this role of being a guy who's not a dad, and certainly not a, you know, a like a husband of like this middle class family. He's just like, he seems like a
I don't know. For lack of a description, he's like he's passing himself off as being kind of cool. I don't know. yeah. I mean he's definitely not cool. But yeah, but he is he or at least passing himself off as having like an emp he's like on a mission that has some importance to him. It's the very like Walter Mitty moment of this dude is completely he is behaving completely outside of his actual experience as a as a dad and a husband. Yeah, yeah, totally. and real quick note, even before he walks in, we can hear
I think it's the Kent State protest is being reported on the radio. So you immediately contextualize that while this guy is doing this stuff, it's happening with the backdrop of the Vietnam War and civil rights protests. So yeah, I didn't immediately clock it as Kent State 'cause I didn't talk about a massacre or anything, but it it it it's clearly this time. It's two years after the summer of love and and it could easily be Kent State or it could be one of basically a million other campus protests. When is Kent when does Kent State happen? I think it was nineteen seventy. and I think it is that it could be for sure. All go on.
Over the course of Act One, we s more slowly realize that this is kind of maybe the only ambition JB has. In one scene, he's barely waking up as Terry has like already got the kids ready for school and she's ready to go to her job, which she has and he does not seem to have, leaving him to casually read the paper. When he's at home, his uniform, which is like an LL Bean Shetland sweater and just the baggiest boxers you've ever seen, he goes out and as she's driving away in her little Volkswagen Beetle, taking the kids to school and going to her job.
He's just in his undies. We hear throughout this time that he has some skill with finis carpentry. His dad, in a in a dinner scene that's pretty funny, says, like, there's this other guy who's basically the foreman of his own construction crew. And then he says something like, JB, you seem to have a lot of time on your hands. Why don't you do something with even a modicum of ambition? doesn't he immediately pass judgment on whoever's being talked about by his dad? He says something like that guy sucks or he's dumb or something. So we don't get a sense of what
If any like the thing he studied in school, which I kind of don't want to tease because that's part of the reveal later, that helps you understand how he ever ever thought he could conceive of fencing stolen artwork. Museums are probably very easy things to steal from. Like the Louvre is the most securitized museum in the world. It's still got its stuff lifted because even though it is the most securitized museum in the world, that security is like 10 years behind or whatever. But once you
steal something, you have to figure out how to sell it, unless you're just gonna hang it on your wall, which he does at one point. And that story real quickly, but which just happened, yeah. that was one of the like footnotes of it immediately. It's like whoever did this had no shot at at unloading that stuff. No, totally. In 2025. Yeah. Yeah. So there are these questions where that kind of do come up if you've ever watched a heist movie. It's like, okay, so how are you gonna these aren't diamonds. Yeah. It's they're a very specific kind of provincial, you know, abstract expressionist from America.
How's he gonna sell these things? We don't know yet. Maybe that's the mastermind part here. We'll figure it out. Sure. Bill Camp plays his father, like I said, makes his disappointment clear every single second he's on screen. Hope Davis is all his also disapproving, but also definitely enabling mother. And it's with the Davis character that we get a bit of insight about the c the family's class position at first. She's always dressed like Jackie Kennedy at first. We don't initially know where this dude's at and where his family's at. In the sort of, you know, in 1970, we still have a pretty
robust middle class, like his dad. He could be like a foreman at a factory or something. He doesn't he's not necessarily high society. We have no idea what the what the dad or the mom for that matter do for their money. Totally. The mom is always wearing a pin with a little F. And Benji, you asked me if I knew what the pin with the F symbolized. I think I do. Like if you go to the museum and go in for a day, you get a little sticker.
At the down at the Mac here that basically tells the security guard you've paid for your day and you haven't. They even have different they basically have a color for every different day of the week. So it's like the lowest possible version of like how you would tell if somebody's actually paid for their experience. She's got a permanent one, which is like what a society lady would show. Like would she would wear it both to like give her free access to the museum? It's also the sort of thing that would say to anybody she sees lunching or walking around town, she's a patron.
She doesn't merely like the Framingham Art Gallery. She is a patron of the Framingham Art Gallery. So that's like literally the first little moment. There's like, this is these people are probably society people. Their names are etched on a stone outside or whatever. Exactly. Yeah, they're getting thank yous. Okay. As his plan is unfolding, JB actually goes to lunch with his mother and asks for seed money for a really promising carpentry job where he says the homeowner wants to create this very specific kind of modernist Japanese cabinetry.
He's the perfect guy for the job because he's got these carpentry skills. The mom is going to enable him. I already said that, but you can tell she's like, is he actually gonna do this or is he just gonna lose me more money? Does you get a sense that this is not the first time an ask has been made of his mother? He very con conspicuously does not ask his father. And when his mom does finally say sure and starts writing the check, he says she says, Don't tell your dad about this. Let's just keep it between us.
So around the same time, I can't remember if it's before the lunch scene or after the lunch scene, he we meet his co-conspirators for the first time. It's three dudes. We don't really get much about them to begin with. Near the end of the scene, you hear Alana Haim call his name. And unsurprisingly, this is the moment that makes it into the trailer, which I think would mislead a lot of people to think you're just gonna watch this very fun, silly caper movie. And it's almost sitcom-esque, like all in the family kind of a moment. Totally. They're trying on the
Pantyhose. Yeah. That are in the the brand is called Legs. Right. And it's this little eggshell. Apostrophe E G G S. Yeah. And so they have an eggshell container that they come in. It's some of the most hokey branding ever, but they were so popular in the eighties. but they put this things on their head, and at one point JB says enormous improvement, which is it's like funny. Yeah. Totally. Yeah. And it makes them actually seem kind of relatable. And it's right at that point where you're st you're kind of like still on the fence, like is Kelly Reichardt.
Presenting this character is kind of he's a lovable doofus. Right. Yeah. So the crew he hires is Guy Hickey, who I will just refer to as a white guy with an afro. Yep. Ronnie Gibson is a black guy who seems a little trigger happy or just very, very gung-ho. There's also a getaway driver. Do we even learn the getaway driver's name? It's Larry. Okay. So the car thief.
Guy slash getaway driver ends up just being the Car Thief guy. And he leaves and he says, I'm th I threw in some jersey plates for your trouble. So now JB actually has to get his fingers dirty because he was not intending he's the mastermind of the heist. He's not the guy actually who was supposed to be doing the heist. He was hiring these other guys to do it. JB's gonna have to do the getaway driving himself, which he's not super happy about because he's
Ostensibly a stay-at-home dad. So he's planning, I think, to be watching from afar with his kids. And then he realizes now I have to basically find a babysitter. He calls and has a really one of many super inconsiderate or a couple in super inconsiderate conversations with his wife, where she's actually at her job. At her she's whispering like, I'm at work. Like, what are you doing? And he says, I got stuff to do. He was trying to pawn off childcare. And trying to or even even just trying to get her.
To call her friend. Yes. And she was in, she was basically like, You take care of it. The heist does not go to plan. There's a number of people in the scene, including a distracted schoolgirl who's sort of walking aimlessly around the museum reciting French and kind of looking at stuff. The girl reciting French, she's like, comes in and sees these two goofballs with stockings on their heads, with legs panting hose over their heads. Legs panting hose over their heads.
So this was supposed to be just like a quick smash and grab, or maybe not even smash, maybe just a grab job, right? Grab it. There's so little security. The security guy's always asleep. You should just be able to grab these paintings and run out the door. Ronnie, the slightly too the reason he seemed a little trigger happy is he actually is trigger happy, pulls a gun on a child. And then when the security guard tries to stop them, he beats up the security guard or just punches them a couple of times. But there's and now an assault has happened and they run out.
And jump in the back of the car and take off. They don't get caught or anything, but there is people are paying attention to this more than they would be, I think. Yep. His affect, JB's affect, is so pleasant. I think at this point, Kelly Reichardt is still presenting JB as kind of lovable. And she's really leaning into this kind of star persona charm, gravitas, riz, whatever you want to call it of Josh O’Connor. Yeah. He's just very chill. And it I think as an audience member, you're still not quite sure about.
Is this guy actually a sociopath? Or am I supposed to like find him still relatable? He kind of has this kind of let's maybe even mouth open a little, you know, where you just you don't you don't feel you don't feel you feel like he's somewhat innocent, even though the things he's doing are totally deplorable. Yeah. It's almost like he's innocent because he doesn't realize other people have interiority. Like he thinks he might be the only
like thinking. It's like philosophical skepticism, the idea that you like can't see inside anybody else's head. So this is a kind of a 2024 meme, but like he's the main character of his story, right? Like he's the quintess, maybe the first, the the certainly the quintessential like main character. Like I don't care about anybody else around me. They're all there to enable me moving through life. And he can't conceive of a scenario in which other people around him are onto him. Yeah.
And for the most part, because this is the nineteen seventies and a lot of people in a the class circumstances that he comes from are sort of languishing. Yeah. He can he kind of can get away with it. Yeah. Okay. Luke, we have to talk about the movie Bottle Rocket. Yes. Okay. And I want to get there by first talking about Steven Soderbergh's nineteen ninety-eight banger. Out of sight. Yeah, I got a problem. It's the dumbest fucking shakedown in the history of dumb shakedowns.
This is the dumbest fucking shakedown in the history of dumb shakedowns. Well, I think this is the dumbest fucking heist in the history of dumb heist. easily. Yeah. I had to go back and watch a scene in Bottle Rocket. Okay. When Dignan, the character played by Owen Wilson, is the mastermind in that movie. And he and his brother, real life brother, Anthony, who's played by his brother Luke Wilson, they're plotting the robbery of a library. Do you remember this? I do. And it's just to steal petty cash. Yeah.
And when they break into the library, it's kind it's got all these different analogs to what happens in the mastermind when they when they rob their local art museum. Stalkers.
Stalkers, where are the other stalkers? This is why why I wanted to talk about this in the context of the mastermind is because the language of storytelling in the mastermind at this point is similar to bottle rocket. You feel seduced into thinking this is just low stakes, shenanigans. It's silly, there's not much consequence here. And it's it's kind of funny that they don't have any big bags to put the petty cash into, so they have to put it into these tiny little sacks. Let's move, come on, a bigger one, you idiot. What do you think? Don't call me an idiot, you
Do have a do have bigger bags for atlases or dictionaries? sir. And there's a similar moment in Mastermind when they're going to put the stolen paintings in the back of the station wagon. They get out and there's a wide shot of the station wagon and they have to roll down. It's yeah, so it's like a 70s station wagon where you could open the back with like open up like a car door, or you could roll down the window. And he's slowly hand cranking the window. It's a external hand crank. Yeah. It's hilarious.
So and instead of hoses on their heads, Dignan and Anthony have put small strips of like masking tape across their noses. Yeah, just to describe themselves. Yeah. And at one point when they're robbing the library, the guy asks them, he's Why do you have the tape on your noses? I I I felt like this is we are still in the universe of thinking low stakes. You've been seduced to thinking, I think I'm at I think I'm in JB's corner. I I I like this guy. Do I?
Anyway, continued Luke. After the they get away, they they don't actually get away, but they leave the scene of the crime. JB then needs he's got the paintings in his house. He does one has one weird scene that the audience had different that the audience had different interpretations of, but he actually hangs one of the paintings on the wall at one point and then like leaves it up maybe overnight. But it's back to this kind of he's performing the role of I am not a dad and I'm not a husband. And he has this background, which we're gonna get to, of being a guy who knows about art. Yeah.
But it's just a moment of him almost pantomiming what it would be like to have this piece sitting on his wall. Totally it's amazing. It's an amazing moment. I think your read about like he's he's pretending to be a person who doesn't have a family. That's interesting to me. I want to think more about that. For me, what it was like he's pretending to be the sort of person who like he's basically pretending to be his own dad. Like he's the sort of person who might have the enough money to own an Arthur Dove. a little bit. Yeah, yeah.
Back to this whole idea of him having disdain for everyone around him and not even imagining a scenario in which he'd get caught. Yeah. It feels kind of like he wants to both steal the art and be the and also demonstrate and kind of peacock this role of someone who who appreciates the art too. Yeah. He also has a moment at this point in the story where we talked about on our episode about highest to lowest and high and low, about the Takeuchi character in high and low and how he's really stoked.
About seeing examples in the media. This is the thief of his of his theft. Yep. The the or the kidnapper. The character who's similar in the movie High and Low to the JB character in The Mastermind is checking his mentions. He's looking at the newspaper clippings that are talking about what he's done. Yep. That's that's done a few times in this movie. And this is the first time where that happens. Yep. JB, though, can't just hang on to these paintings. We assume he's trying to sell them. We have no clue what if if at all, what what his plan is, if any, but he has them in his house.
And he has to get rid of them. This is the point at which Reichardt made that motion with the camera angle to be like, maybe just put him in the attic, you idiot. Yeah. but instead, he's the only time he actually uses his career or his talent as a Finnish carpenter to build this extremely elaborate and by the way he carries it, very heavy seeming box to then slide all the art in to keep it protected. And this was probably the most cringy and brilliant.
Mm the the entire audience lost their mind over this. I know you wanted to chat about it too. I kinda want to tee it up with a moment from our audience. This was our friend Jacqueline and then a new friend named Jill, talking about how aimless and bumbling he is. That's w that's the word that was just on the tip of my tongue. Feels like he's just bumbling from one spot to the next with no real like friction.
He's artificially putting friction into his life. Almost like for kick. Well, his buddy told him he'd been chipping away at the edges. That's how he described it. So he's kind of a loser forever. I just loved her characterization of artificially putting friction into his life. Because in this specific example, that is exactly what he's doing. There are this barn in the middle of central Massachusetts might be the worst and hardest place to hide art. It's perfect that he's doing this at a farm.
where there are farm animals, including pigs, because he is milking the hell out of this opportunity in this moment. Yeah. We've talked about on recent episodes, the movie The Hurt Locker. Yeah. I've been listening to this podcast about Cohen Brothers movies where No Country for Old Men comes up a lot, where these films show all these intricate processes and the use of hands and people having expertise. Well, his like lack of expertise in in
doing anything that has led to success in his life. It's like he's just gonna do the most he can to take this moment and elongate it. Yeah. And to make himself feel like a sense of accomplishment, I guess, for lack of an inscription. And for the audience, it it just compounds the folly, but you can tell it is like him being this is what his idea of diligence or something is. Cause it the scene actually starts before he leaves the house, showing him packing this storage container in the very beginning. Yeah.
The barn has a rickety, I mean, you know, Massachusetts was colonized in the sixteen hundreds. This ladder he climbs might have been from the seventeen hundreds. It's and he realizes he wants he has this idea clearly that he wants to put these paintings up in the hayloft, but it it's too heavy for this a a a ladder that's about barely the width of his body. Yeah. Time dilates at this point. It's it's minutes. It's minutes. It's incredible because like I think this is the moment in the movie where all that cuteness, the
The Wes Anderson adjacent, like this is low stakes just for giggles, haha. Like I don't it felt very quirky Ots filmmaking to, wait a minute. Now this is deeply it's slow cinema universe where he's carefully putting him in the wood crate. The other thing is I wanna make a quick note about this back when I talked about this being a surprise screening. Yeah, there was a deleted scene.
Where he builds the box. They show they just show one shot from it in the in the edit that we saw. Right. Which is where it's the tail end. You can hear the national anthem playing on the television in his shop where he's built this box that this box that he's putting the art in. Yeah. Kelly Reichardt shot him building the entire box. Yes. I felt pain painfully aware.
Of our audience that we're watching this with, even though I was laughing to a degree where I was like, should I get thrown out of the movie theater? Right. And I think that's something that's it's like it's weird to talk about a something, a scene that unfolds this slowly as slapstick, but that's kind of how it feels. But it is already turned tonally and maybe more in the mind of the audience than right the way Reichardt's doing it, to be like, God, this is actually getting kind of painful. Totally painful. Yeah. You know, this shit took him all night. It was probably Luke 15 minutes of the movie.
It might have been. And it's it to me, it speaks to something. We're gonna come back to this at the end with some stuff that Kelly Reichardt has said, but it speaks to the incredible amount of free time afforded to white dudes with privileged backgrounds. Yeah. It doesn't happen to all privileged white dudes, but it does happen to most of them. Yeah. You know, his wife is getting r getting ready to like, you know, get up the next morning and go to her job and he's He can just pull in all nighter fumble fucking around with his stolen art from his local tiny
art museum and sticking them in a a barn. Maybe it's owned by his family is is kind of my guess. He makes everything impossibly difficult and tedious because that's where he's finding joy and purpose. Meanwhile his wife's trying to keep his kids alive. He basically just has to kind of like flop his way out of the barn, gets himself pretty dirty. Yeah. and then he goes home. Grabs some donuts on his way home.
To be like, I just went out for donuts real quick, sweetie. He's so he's holding this bag that looks like it might only have one donut in it, sneaking in the back, or maybe coming in from the garage, and he just sees the cops are inside. And then And when his wife sees him, she's already giving him kind of a death stare. I mean, for obvious reasons. I mean, come on, the cops are there. Well, I was just saying my favorite part of their introduction is that they say that they are art crime detectives. So I look so Is that a thing, Luke?
The FBI, yeah. So it's a it's a d I think it's a detective long, who I assume is from the Framingham police, yeah, and an agent Carroll of the FBI's like art crimes department. Basically, you, we, the character, is left wondering like how could this have already happened? Like, how could the cops have already been onto him? Well, we find out Ronnie actually one heist wasn't enough, tried to go rob a bank, got caught, and immediately ratted JB out. Yeah. This is where I love that Red Card is still.
Dropping some whimsy and some funny lines. one of the cops says, We're not sure you understand the gravity of removing paintings from public spaces. Well, and also here comes the big reveal, too. Yeah. He drops the ultimate chess move here. So after a little bit of back and forth, he says, basically, hey, do you fellas know my dad? Judge Mooney. Mm-hmm. So now we know kind of the full class position of this guy. Yep.
and it's a it's a record scratch moment when he says this. The tone of the conversation changes completely. It goes like honestly, I the way I was remembering it in my mind, it's like Agent Carroll is like licking his chops like a the wolf in the a Looney Tunes cartoon. We got your ass. And then when he realizes this is the son of a judge, he just goes,
And they immediately down shit. It's like if I remember I he might not have done this, but it f it felt symbolically like it is. They took his notes and just folded them and put in his pocket. Like kinda it's almost similar. Real quick, hang on. There's a dinner conversation earlier that I think becomes kind of key when you find out that his dad is a judge, 'cause this is a reveal to the audience. So when they're watching television earlier and they're seeing the report of the theft and he's watching it with his family.
It's the second time in the movie that they've been doing a dinner time with him at the grandparents' house. At the grandparents. His parents' house. His the judge and the Hope Davis character. That dad character, the judge, is the ultimate know it all patriarch. Yeah. He has to Archibunker like comment on everything that's happening to him. He's like sitting in his easy chair. Yeah, it is a very archibunker moment.
And as a judge, he is passing judgment on all the events of the day, whatever's happening on the news in the background. And I think it's that moment where you get this kind of glimpse about JB's demons. It's his dad.
His dad's an expert about everything. Cause when this thing happens on the when the when the when the r reporting of the theft of the art is being on the television and they're all reacting to it. And like the, you know, his wife's like, those girls are gonna be like traumatized for the rest of their lives. And the dad says something about the art and he goes, Well, this is outside my realm of expertise. And it feels like a weird moment where it's like, it's the first time in his whole life that his dad's saying, Outside my realm of expertise. And JB gets to sit there and salivate and be like,
It's in my realm of expertise. So that's I know art. So he thinks he's like sort of built himself a little world where he gets to be the master of art history or whatever. But the other thing his dad says that undercuts that is just referring to how shoddy the heist was. He's like, I don't think those boys thought this through. Yeah.
Ronnie flipped on JB when talking to the cops. Well, JB gets him back fully. He throws that kid under the bus and says, Yeah, he must have a grudge against my father. So he's he's a black kid, so he must have been in trouble with the law in the past. And and this is where we go from back to this idea, it starts off bottle rocket, it's all innocent, low stakes stuff, to then it's just like this bumbling, hmm, what is going on here? And the audience feels a little uncertain too.
This is a huge pivot. He goes full Jerry Lundegaard in this moment. But somehow much worse. He never done this before. But seeing as it's special circumstances and all, he says I can knock a hundred dollars off that true coat. It's like if this dude looks like William H. Macy and not Josh O’Connor, the audience would want nothing to want nothing to do with him by the end of Act One. It reminded me of Spargo. He's such a boob.
He's getting it a little bit. And it's not even about the thing it's about. Fargo. Far Fargo. Fargo. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Terry realizes he's done it and he's thrown this black kid under the bus. He's you know, done the whole like nepotism play with his dad. And at this point, the audience is just like, mm. Ugh. If JB would have just made one smart decision, he could have and ended this whole thing. Because Agent Carroll says something to the effect of like, I'm pretty sure this will all go away if the art just ends up back at the gallery.
We have another comment from our audience about the role of Terry, Alana Haim. Yeah. In terms of how she how she shows up in this movie often off screen. Yeah. The domestic disappointment in that situation. For sure. Just heavy eye eye rolls. I'm not sure we ever see her talk. No, not We hear her talk or we see her be silent, but we never see her talk. For a while I said, I don't think she's gonna speak. But you almost never see Alana Haim
And hear her talking at the same time. Yeah, when she comes down to the basement in the beginning, you only see calves, basically. Well, ironically, because they're putting the pantyhose on there. That's also pretty funny. That is, yeah. There's another sound gag that happens when she realizes when the cops are there and they leave and she realizes that he's done it. She threw a fucking alarm clock
And hit him in the head. Yeah. Ding! Yeah. And then you then it's like one of the old timey alarm clocks with the bell on it. And then the camera is inside the bedroom where this is taking place, and you see that JB's got this welt on his head where Terry hits thrown the alarm clock. And at that point it has this very raising Arizona almost vibe to it. he yells at her, Are you freaking out? You have to have a little faith in me.
And like it reminds me of like when Holly Hunter is parked outside the car and Nathan Jr. and with Nathan Jr. and Nick Cage is stealing the huggies at from the convenience store in raising Arizona. Totally. This is another situation where JB says, take the kids, go to my parents' house, which was just kind of the ultimate indignity to me. The fact that she has to rely on his parents was actually pretty heartbreaking for me. Like the the isolation she must feel in this entire situation was pretty brutal.
Because JB knows that the heat is on him, he goes and borrows a car from his neighbor and they go meet. So Guy, the white guy with a fro, has called him and said, the heat's too much. I need more money. And the moment within a second of JB pulling up, two central casting mobsters pull up as well. This isn't actually about guy wanting more money. This is about guys selling him out to the mob. So the mobsters take JB to get the art, take it off his hands, and
The thing that's really heartbreaking here is Tommy's left with this random dude that he might not even know and impromptu having to be babysat by eating his eating his cheeseburger. Eating his cheeseburger. Meanwhile, JB's getting a lecture from the driver of the mobsters who says, I don't think you you didn't think this through. Yeah. Yeah. Just like his dad said earlier. Yep. So then at this point, obviously JB has nothing left.
To do he doesn't he can't pay his mom back, he can't get the art back, the art's out of his possession. He decides to go on the run. It's like there's nothing left about this character that at this point that you can find even slightly redeeming. Right. So that by the time he ends up going and finding a couple of his former college friends so he can go hide out on the lamb, you're now just witness to the complete unraveling of a honestly a he's just a you know.
He's a good looking sociopath. Yeah. He hops on the bus and ends up at his at the farm of two friends from art school, Fred, played by John Magaro, and Maude played with a real disdain for the character for JB by Gaby Hoffmann, who I think does disdain as well as anybody of her generation, I think. And she really dials it in for this one. These characters are kind of mirrors of JB and Terry. She's practical and grounded. He's a bit of a dreamer.
Fred has this moment where he's talking to JB and he says he's been waiting for someone to quote unquote come along and blow my mind. And he seems to be referencing JB. Meanwhile, you've got Maude who says, You really made Fred's weak. But but I find it kind of upsetting. Yep. Maude correctly
Guesses that JB was planning to use his old art school FISA advisor to fence and sell the paintings. And Maude just basically tells him, I don't want you to be here in the morning, or you got to get out of here ASAP. Fred says he should go to Toronto and flop at his brother's commune, which is out outside of Toronto. So he's he would be in Canada. And he basically says, I don't want to go with a bunch of stinky hippies and draft dodgers, which is like that would obviously be the best thing to do. Go to a different country where you're not actively.
being investigated for a crime. JB the mastermind says he plans to go to Cleveland instead to drop in out of the blue on another set of friends. Has JB called these friends to make sure they're in town, Benji? No, he has not. Of course he hasn't. Once he gets to Cleveland, he he has to rip a page out of the phone book to even figure out where they live. And so he only spends a relatively brief amount of time in Cleveland because he has nothing to do there. Yeah. Basically hitchhikes
to what we eventually realize is Cincinnati, Ohio, but it's actually not immediately obvious that that's where he's going.
So at the bus station, Benji, there was a there's a scene that happens on the bus on the way to Cleveland that really affected you. Did you want to chat about it? Yeah. And our we talked about it with our audience too. There's this moment where JB sees that there's a sailor who's ostensibly gonna ship out for the Vietnam War and he's there with his wife and his baby, and they're, you know, being affectionate with one another. It's clearly gonna be goodbye. And the JB character is paying attention to it, and then he falls asleep. And when he wakes up, the sailor is gone.
And the woman is there looking out the window with her baby. It's it's such an understated moment, but you feel like JB's coming to the realization that he can't perform that role anymore. That all the things that he's done performatively in his life, he can't perform the one of being a dad or being a husband. Not even the like perfunctory performance of fatherhood appeals to him anymore. He has a call with his kid, he's in a payphone and he's talking to Tommy.
And in the middle of talking to his kid, who's telling him about his day or whatever's going on in his life. Yep. And because the hitchhikers that he's with or the people he's hitched a ride with are leaving, he just drops the payphone and his kid is still talking. Because the the driver honks and like starts to drive off and he just like drops the phone. Yeah. And he's not sad. I don't think he is. I think the viewer is sad. And that's what I brought through my own projection of like, my God, this is awful. His his kid is so cute.
I think he's supposed to feel that, but he doesn't. I think we as a viewer feel that. 'Cause I think we're led the way that we're supposed to be led. We're supposed to see that as like that's what you're losing, bro. Absolutely. And then he calls the kid, right? At this stop. He calls the kid. Really, he wanted the mom, right? Even on that call he asked for the mom and he wants the mom to get a wire. Yeah. So he didn't learn anything from that. He we did. JB is clearly at this point on the descent into becoming a full on mask-off psychopath. Totally. The point of that to me is
Kelly Reichardt basically paralleling these two lives, the man who's about to go ship off, who's being forced by the state to maybe go die in a foreign war and leave his family behind, very much not doing this by choice. And this guy who has just somewhat flippantly, because he wanted to feel something, blown his whole life up. Out of a sense of privilege, entitlement, that the world is filled with suckers and they all owe me something, sort of a vibe. Yeah. So he's in he's in Cleveland for literally one scene and then just hitchhikes somewhere we eventually figure out as Cincinnati.
But this is a place where he knows no one. So he uses basically the last of the cash that he had from his mother to do a carpentry job but actually rob a rob a museum to take a room in what seems like a boarding house. Yeah. he gets the paper, learns the paintings have been recovered and returned to the museum. He decides to call his wife. And it almost seems like he's having this is about to be his emotional moment where he's saying, Hey, I screwed up. Like, help me, whatever. I'm sorry, baby. He says something to the effect of,
Everything I did, I did for you. And you hear an incredulous sort of moan from Terry. And literally, just because there are four people in this family and three of them are not him, he goes, three-quarters of what I did, I did for you. Jesus Christ. Yeah. and then he does another just utterly unforgivable thing. He tries to sort of get back into her good graces. You can't tell how much he actually she's actually buying it. And then in a jaw-dropping moment, he asks her.
Her to ask his parents for more money. They'll do it if you ask, he says. And she hangs up on him. Which is, I think that is Alana Haim like actually reclaiming some sort of agency for maybe for the first time. Because up to this point, she's done everything he's told him she's told him to do. At this point in the story, he is fucked. He has totally abandoned his family. Beyond, yeah. It turns out that the stakes were high after all.
He's alone, he's desperate, and he comes to the conclusion when in doubt, just steal. He is like a kind of pernicious version of a Walter Mitty. Yeah. And I call this like his Raskolnikov moment. He is like the character in Crime and Punishment, or like the character Michelle in Bresson's Pickpocket. It's like every moment is isolating, it's lonely. there's a point in the boarding house where
He's even yelled at for slapping the cigarette machine, which is like an interesting indignity. And it's these young black men that are again talking about their time in the Vietnam War and how when they were in Paris Island, like their false bravado kind of fell away because they said something like things get real. And you're and he's listening to this conversation. And we're very aware of like these young guys that are just being thrown into this war to be
Effectively murdered. Just thrown into the wood shipper. Yeah, totally. And the and the representation of blackness in this movie, I think, becomes really interesting at this point because of what happens in the next scene, which we're about to get to. The one final thing. So you you're right. He's totally screwed. But here's where I also think Reichardt is saying men like JB, whether it's because of race or class privilege or whatever, this is a world in America in 1970 that's like set up to just like propel them along, how in regardless of how incapable they are.
Cause in this f boarding house, in a pocket of a shirt that's just been left behind by somebody else, he finds a passport. Yeah. He was literally cornered, and then he just happens to find a passport, which then he uses his finished carpentry skills or like with an Xacto knife to basically do a little light forgery to get a passport that has his picture but not his name. Yeah. And all of a sudden, maybe the game's back on. It's yeah, it's another pernicious Walter Mitty moment because he's like Frank Abignale in Catch Me If You Can, the great Leonardo DiCaprio performance.
He's taking this passport and sort of fashioning it to be him. And at this point, Luke, I was so aware of our audience. Nobody had laughed in at least 30 minutes. You think so? We have fully left behind the universe of, this is funny and quaint and quirky, aka Wes Anderson. This is like full on crime crime of punishment time. I think bottle rocket was a good shout for earlier in the movie. This is
Crime Yeah, yeah. You're saying crime and punishment. So he's got the passport. He could get out of the country, except he still doesn't have any money. So he ends up just sort of bumming around Cincinnati, ends up in a diner. Our friend Jaclyn had a really amazing insight about the time he spends in the cafe and it's or the the diner. And it's really actually illustrates the power of the slow cinema thing. All the times when he's like waiting around, like I I don't know if you've all experienced that before. Almost like on the edge of homelessness where you're just like
I'm in between this place and that place. I gotta wait around, I gotta observe people, I gotta like see if there's an o like an in, you know, there's an opening here. she captures that really well. You know, once he's on the run, you can sense the desperation real it's real. It's real heavy. It's so true and it I think it plays out best in this diner scene where he's just sort of
Trying to see, like, where am I gonna get money from? Like, where's it gonna come from? How like that's the next step. That's the thing he's gotta do. He eventually notices, and this honestly, this part, my grandma had a pocketbook like this. It reminded me, and this woman would have been about the age in 1970 my grandma would have been. It was like he's about to steal from an old lady. She's got this pocketbook that's just stuffed full of cash. You know, if I saw that and I had any aspirations, I'd be like, that's my mark. He follows her out and she walks down an alley.
Deeply this is deeply uncomfortable. Yeah. And maybe if you wanna if you wanna say how you remember the scene, but basically she just like lifts he lifts the pocketbook, she screams, he kind of runs. What was deeply uncomfortable about it to you? I just wrote a note. I said he's gonna rob an old lady. What the absolute fuck? Yeah. Is this really she's getting ready to go into her apartment. He's following her. She can pick up on the fact that she's being followed. But he does get the get the pocketbook.
And runs right into the middle of an anti-Vietnam protest that has like it's like not a huge protest. I would say there's like 80 or 90, maybe a hundred people at this protest. That's enough of a people to be a crowd, but it's also kind of sparse, it's a little bit spread out. And obviously, since he's just pickpocketed an old lady, Benji, you wanted to talk about the movie called Pickpocket. Yeah, I mean, this is where it's like the funniest and the smartest and the darkest moment in the movie because
Unlike the Michelle character in Pickpocket, who by the way is very well dressed and very handsome, the Michelle is supremely skilled, almost a balletic thief in Pickpocket. JB just runs up in plain daylight and snatches this woman's purse. And then he does so with like the stride and the pacing of a dude who's thinking, I am owed this purse. Just no consideration whatsoever with what he's about to do.
The character Michelle in Brisson's 1959 movie Pickpocket is a very similar character. He's offered jobs by friends. I think there he has a sister character who really supports him, but he just wants nothing to do with it. Again, he thinks he's entitled to more out of life. He's very good looking. He's sympathetic in the movie. it ends with him having this catharsis in jail. But I want to talk about specifically Michelle and his his crew of thieves have a moment where they steal a purse from a woman who's just had her purse filled with cash.
But they do so in a way that's just like it's just completely elegant and it is almost like a it's w super choreographed. Yeah.
So that's how Michel and his crew end up stealing purses and wallets and other things. Where JB just runs up, steals this lady purse, and then he finds himself where, Luke. He just happens to find himself again, just like the the universe trying to give him outs left and right. He runs right into the middle of an anti-Vietnam protest. It's like a hundred people, not a huge one, but enough that it feels like a crowd, perfect place to blend in. He takes the cash, kind of, you know, somewhat somewhat slyly, dumps the pocketbook.
And here's where Reichardt pulls a very funny slide of hand. We're very close to the end of the film. We don't know if he's gonna be caught or not. And we also don't know if he's ever gonna face the repercussions of his actions. But it feels like if it's gonna come at any time, it should be coming now. He keeps walking the parade, and then there's a tap on the shoulder. He turns around and it's like, what's going on? There's a one of the people in the parade, this hippie dude holding the pocketbook he has just dropped. And this is the final credulous male character. Is this the moment of truth? Yeah. No.
The guy says, You dropped this, bro. Yeah. And hands it back. He says, You really should carry it in your breast pocket. It's like, yeah, just carry it in your breast pocket so you don't lose it next time. This is clearly a woman's pocket book. This guy, I don't even know what the guy is doing. It's very funny. It's so funny. Yeah. And that's where the brilliance of the script, I think, and the storytelling really shines for me. JB the criminal is like an invisible concept to basically every all of the men he runs into, and some of the women, but mostly the men. And this is the protection afforded, like we said, by his class, his race.
The way he dresses to signify these things. It was so fascinating to watch him just bumble through everything. And you're just like, he can't last. And he just keeps lasting. It's so wild. And then when they finally get him, you're like, for real, here. This is where they get him. And not for the thing that he should be arrested for. Right. It was such a train wreck and he's so embarrassing. And still, what gets him?
After his absolute moment of violence stealing from that old lady, the peace protest. It was so brilliant. But this is where his downfall, this is where that identity really screws him. He doesn't even think for a second to fear the authorities in Cincinnati, one of the most racist and regressive police forces in the US at this time, that these people might be itching to crack down on something like the Vietnam protest that, under other circumstances, he would never in a million years find himself within a country mile of.
Literally, as the he's still talking to the hippie kid from off screen, an officer tackles the kid and Reichardt cuts to him, and you barely have time to register a surprise on his face when he gets clocked to by the cop. The final scene is of the entire movie is him sitting in the back of a paddy wagon as the door closes. JB is being driven away, but the the s the camera actually pulls back to show more of the scene. So basically JB goes away and what we see are.
Is the mop-up operation of the Cincinnati police. A different hippie kid gets thrown into a squad car. That's maybe the only person they couldn't fit into the paddy wagon. And then one of the other cops picks up one of those kind of Gandalf-y hippie hats that were kind of like conic and like usually leather, and like puts it on his head and does a little jig and all of this. Yeah. Almost like a vaudeville performance. Like he's making fun of making fun of the protesters. I love how this mirrors the fact that JB is.
Performing. He's pretending to be a protester. While he's being taken away, he has his his final moment of protest, which is very, very funny. He's like, wait, wait, wait. There there's been a mistake. And you could tell he's about to issue some type of final like, I'm, I don't know, I'm the son of whatever Mooney, you know, like my dad's a judge or whatever, but they don't care. They shut the door and he's dragged away. And Reichard had an interesting quote about this scene because she is tried to, I think, avoid talking about the overt political message of the movie and just
They were she said we were shooting during the day of the election. wow. And the Teamsters were happy about the result of the election. wow. And the caterers were crying. Wow. We were shooting in J D Vance's neighborhood, a blue city and a red state. So she was trying to have a charitable perspective about being in Cincinnati shooting this. Yeah. They shot it in Cincinnati. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. So that's the end of the movie. That's the end of the movie.
He got caught in a what was a fairly peaceful protest to example we were just making earlier. It's not as though any of these what is he gonna get charged with? He is gonna be out of this whatever jail he's gonna be held in, probably within the before the end of the day. And think about this, he also has that passport. So they might not even realize that me too. Th there's no reason cops don't have computers in this era. There's no reason why anybody's ever gonna think
This is the guy who stole from the Framingham art gallery. If they've even heard of that art heist in Cincinnati, which is also another thing. This is a such a low stakes heist. Probably isn't even national news. The project of this podcast, Luke, is we call it all those moments and we try to talk about the moments from the movie itself, but then we also try to capture something about these movies in the moment that we're all living in. So it's October 2025. Let's find a place for the mastermind within our moment.
I would describe it this way, and I can't wait to hear what you have to say. Yeah. Like Ephis, this is everything I want in a movie. It's my platonic ideal. We started by talking about Kelly Reichardt being one of the greats of slow cinema. Yep. Well, because I love these types of movies, this one spoiled me. Her last two movies are about art. She herself is an artist. This movie is made one choice of fabric, one frame, one choice of actor, one thing that's appearing in the movie at a time.
Everything just feels like it's been stitched together with harmony and precision. And I am completely here for it. Before we get into our kind of thematic takeaways, that's just how I'm feeling about this movie in this moment. You get more and more of the Vietnam War as the film goes on. And that's obviously how the film's referencing it throughout, but it really becomes the set piece of the final moment of the film. We're back in a time of state violence and repression.
I couldn't help but thinking about one battle after another, which also has characters running from feds and cops. Eddington also has its protest scenes. JB, the character in this movie, is using them as a backdrop or as a as a way to conceal himself to get away. He doesn't believe in the project at all. It really shows the cynicism of that entire of the group that he's like sort of met to represent. And it's a movie that when it's set against the backdrop of Vietnam.
But with main characters that are in no danger of having probably anyone they know impacted by the war, it really seems to want to think about not just the fascists and the anti-fascists, which are what a lot of these other films are about, but also the sort of petit bourgeois, the petty nobility, and what where they get to exist in society, the sort of like rarefied air where nothing can really touch them. That's kind of where the real power in this country lies, is with those is with JB's dad and people like that, the society people of this world.
They aren't maybe aren't real power brokers, but they also never have to worry about their kids getting drafted and sent off to a foreign war. She's asking us to think critically about the role that men like JB play in our lives and how I think back to this depiction of a kind of languishing society in the middle of the Vietnam War, because that that was happening too. Not everybody was out, you know, participating in protests. Some people were perfectly fine with with what was happening in the Vietnam War. Absolutely.
And I think a lot of the conversation about what's happening right now in the United States is that we are languishing and we're also kind of asleep while these things are happening. Everything I just said, the obvious thing is that this kind of privilege deadens us to the suffering of others, but it doesn't just deaden us to the suffering of others. I think the JB character best represents that this kind of privilege just deadens ourselves to ourselves, deadens us to ourselves. You know, you don't
We don't know his interiority. We don't know if he has any ambition at all. He's never had to think about it. He's never had the friction of life has never forced him to reflect on anything. He creates friction to feel. Well, and he's had the support of women. Yeah. Right? Absolutely. Like every bit of free time he has to do what he wants to do is his wife has a job and afforded by hit first his wife, but then also his mom, who's funding what he's doing. Yep. So it's time to get to this quote.
From Kelly Reichardt that she gave at Conn when the mastermind was shown there. She says about the character of JB Mooney that he quote follows a certain tradition of disenchanted and most entitled white male people of the world going off to find themselves and having the luxury to do that. She has a couple more quotes that I want to get to, but before that, I just want to speak to this.
Notion of like what the JB type characters are doing in our world. I do think that that's kind of what I could imagine in 10 years JB doing. He gets out of jail that day and he continues to manipulate his environment. And our environment is built for guys like him to succeed. Yeah. He has the makings of a CEO. He's vicious, he's handsome, he's almost unassuming in his menace. And I think back to a quote from our guest on the podcast, the filmmaker who made Boys Go to Jupiter.
Julian Glander. Every trait of JB characterized in this movie suggests that he's going to be very successful. Our history is littered with examples of guys like JB becoming really successful. Here's a quote from Julian when he was on our podcast. He said, I actually have found the limits of being a pretty smart person. Like it's actually a pretty low ceiling what you can do with above average intelligence. Yeah. The things that are going to get you far in a career are actually ambition.
Viciousness and people skills. The things that bring you too far in life have nothing to do with intelligence at all. Your ability to be nurturing and caring and patient, you know, to be decent. JB's journey is one that goes from failing to steal art from a small museum in his town to mugging an old woman for cash and using a civil rights protest to camouflage his crime. It's like crime and punishment if Roskolnikov is not only an entitled and immoral and depraved brat.
But who's also a privileged fucking idiot and a son of a powerful judge. I think he's much more likely to just follow his dad into being a small town judge. Because that's the sort of thing you can get by on family name and stuff like that. Well, the good news is being a judge in the United States doesn't give you any opportunity to do terrible, harmful things to this country. So it'll probably be fine. It'll probably all work out fine. Yeah. On on every TV in the background of the mastermind, I I couldn't help but pick up on this. The handiwork of one of America's worst ever.
entitle entitled sociopaths is war criminal Robert McNamara. And he learned his trade, everything he knows from fellow war criminal Curtis LeMay in World War II. Lemay said if we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals. And I think he's right.
He and I'd say I were behaving as war criminals. So I wanted to to give a quote from Roger our friend Roger Ebert, friend of the podcast Roger Ebert when talking about pickpocket and how think about this in relationship to JB. Brisson's Michel, he's talking about pickpocket, like Dostoevsky's hero Raskolnikov, needs money in order to realize his dreams, and he sees no reason why some lackluster
Ordinary person should not be forced to supply it. The reasoning is immoral, but the characters claim special privileges above and beyond common morality. Another critic, Gary Indiana, added that, like crime and punishment, a man commits forbidden acts, gets caught, goes to prison, where his suffering is ameliorated by the steadfast love of a good woman. In that case, it's his sister in pickpocket. So to me, Reichardt is interested in a key phrase from Gary Indiana.
Ameliorated by the steadfast love of a good woman. Back to the observation that was made about the credulity of the men, the incredulity of the women. Yeah. Maude calls him out on his bullshit. His wife Terry is totally immune to his gaslighting by halfway halfway through this movie. And here's what Reichardt said to the BBC in a recent interview: These guys are such jerks. They're misogynists. They can afford to break away and do what they want.
They're not pinned down with kids. Just the idea of being able to be an outlaw is a privilege. But in the end, you root for them because that's just a narrative thing. There's an added, more objective look at him at times through the women in JB's life who he counts on, who are taxed by his freedom. Personal freedom being a huge theme in American politics today. But at what cost and who carries the weight of that? Oof. Yeah. So Martin Martin LaSalle.
The actor who played Michelle in Pickpocket, also incredibly handsome. Okay. This is another thing I just want to talk about is r the anger and righteousness depicted in some of these characters we're talking, whether we're talking about Takeauchi or the JB character, right? Let's compare them. There can be anger, there can be righteousness born out of a sense of injustice suffered not just by a self, but by others.
There's also an anger and self righteousness born out of a sense of entitlement. absolutely. I'm the son of JB Mooney. I deserve more than I have. I shouldn't have to earn it. And quoting Ebert again, I see no reason why some lackluster ordinary person shouldn't have to supply it. Yeah. And that's why the Takayuchi character is a sympathetic character, even though he does some pretty despicable things in that movie. And JB, you couldn't in a million years be sympathetic.
To me, bottle rocket, silly, pickpocket, somewhat serious. Mastermind is like Kelly Reichardt kind of saying, like, why not both? Mm-hmm. Like these sorts of dudes can be silly like Dignan, they can be good looking like Michelle, but with JB, he's both silly and good looking, but he's also doing a ton of harm to the people around him. And one of the funny things about silly and serious like silly but destructive, he doesn't have enough ambition to be a fascist. But that's one of the things historically, especially in Germany, about fascism. Like
They were considered to be a little ridiculous. Mussolini was kind of ridiculous. There's a lot of aspects of this that are ridiculous. There's this human sense sometimes that, like, if you're an oaf, you can't possibly be destructive. But that's exactly what happens. Like it allows people to accrete power in a way because you think they're silly. That's exactly what's happening to us right now. People like one of the reasons that Nick Fuentes and the Groipers are always trying to make everything into a joke is that they're trying to obscure their real intent.
And even when the everybody knows what's going on, they continue that up and it just allows it allows enough deflection to disguise their real power. And I think that's pretty interesting. Not that J B is doing any of those things, but that's another aspect of this that I find a little interesting. JB's bumblingness also is maybe what helps him work his way through life as well. You can also see his trajectory taking him toward being full fashion for sure.
Because it's like, yeah, this is a platform that fits everything that I'm kind of doing because there is a kind of journey for him in this movie, one of being this again, kind of guileless and tacitly disgusting person to full on actively disgusting by the end of the movie. Yeah.
I want to talk a little bit about Meek's Cutoff. So Meek's cutoff has a relationship to great anti-Westerns like Assassination of Jesse James. You've seen Assassination of Jesse James? Yeah. Okay. So it's set in 1845. This movie came out in 2010. Oregon Trail. There's a character named Stephen Meek, played by Bruce Greenwood. Based on a real person. Because there it really is a Meek Cutoff. There is an actual Meek's cutoff. Yep. Stephen Meek is hired by a group of settlers that includes a character named Emily, played by Michelle Williams. Meek is he is the JB of this movie.
He's a teller of tall tales. He's a racist with a violent past. He's been hired by these settlers to get wherever they're going, somewhere near the what's now the Dalles. Yeah. And at one point, Meek and these settlers are going like they're walking like 10 to 15 miles a day. The men are all on horses. The women and the kids are walking. Meek essentially falls asleep on horseback at one point. And throughout the movie, he's giving them nothing but terrible information. They're not getting any closer to water, which because they're all like,
This is a true thing that happened. This is a real character who did this. He helped these they even called him immigrants. They called him American immigrants, these settlers that were all white. Yeah. And they're in Native American territories. Okay. There's a scene where Greenwood describes his understanding of men versus women, and he's just doing this crazy bullshit philosophy of chaos of women versus the destruction of men. and this movie seems to have a lot to say about the recklessness of whiteness and masculinity and the price that's paid for that.
by women and non white people because when he's doing this whole shtick, the Michelle Williams character is just looking at him with like disgust. Dis disdain. Totally. You don't know much about women, do you Stephen Meat?
n I know something or other. If you say so. Well I know women are different from men, I know that much. But that movie ends with the Meek character deferring not only to Michelle Williams character, but the Native American man who they've kidnapped.
This movie comes out in 2010, though, when Obama is trying to get the Affordable Care Act passed. Fifteen years later, I don't think there's any of that kind of optimism in the mastermind. I would have to describe this and as this ending, I don't know if you agree with this, as quite cynical about what happens next for in the reflection of what it's making about 2025 life in America. Dude, I had not even thought about this until just now, but that is we we just got done talking about how Catherine Bigelow has no idea what to do in the Trump moment.
Kelly Reichardt knows exactly what to do in the Trump moment, both with endings that have indeterminate resolutions. It's not quite like having him sent off in a paddy wagon isn't quite as indeterminate as like the bomb never going off in in House of Dynamite. See, I've not only do I not remember the movie, I don't even remember the title of the movie. You said in the podcast it wouldn't be remembered six hours later. I've forgotten the name of the movie. it's not quite that indeterminate, but it is, it did cause us a
half of what we talked about in the in the with the audience. And the thing that I think I've returned to most of all is that he actually doesn't have anything to worry about when that paddy wagon c shuts. He might not even be scared in that moment. He might already know how this is gonna go for him. Again, we Catherine Bigelow is an excellent filmmaker. She's also a filmmaker that has been blessed by Hollywood in a way that Kelly in a way that Reichardt never has, right? No, there's a great moment on the big picture recently with Sean Fennessey and he's talking to Adam Nayman and
Fantasy is saying that, you know, Reichardt, first of all, Michelle Williams dropped this in a press conference years ago that Reichardt is working at Bard College. So Bard College is in New York. She lives in Portland. I'm saying she's driving across the country. But Michelle Williams drops this news that she's working at Bard College to get healthcare. That's my that's my point. Yeah. And so but the point that Fennessy was making when he was describing her history as a filmmaker is that he said she quote, jumps from one lily pad to the next.
She made a movie on A24. She made a movie for IFC. She's now made a movie for Mubi. The truth is, every one of these kind of independent, very pro small cinema distributors or studios or whatever are supportive when they do it once. I actually think the mastermind's doing quite well, so I can't wait to come back to see how it's doing as far as far as box office goes. But you know, to to the point you're making in the one that we've talked about with thinking about even EFIS, EFIS, we know just from our conversation with Carson Lund.
Probably cost a million bucks, maybe, maybe, maybe two. I don't know. But these movies are such microscopic budgets. And, you know, when we were talking about how you could use a period piece to say something about our moment in 2025, Kelly Reichardt has just hit it out of the fucking hit it out of the fucking park saying something about 2025 with the mastermind. House of Dynamite was a pretty expensive budget movie. Yeah. Made by Catherine Bigelow for Netflix. And it has
Jack shit to say about 2025, which I find just crazy. I would put the mastermind at near the top of my list and I would put it above, look, you can come at me, above one battle after another, as far as something that I'm going to think about a lot when it comes to 2025 and the world that we're living in right now, in this period piece about 1970, than I will even about one battle after another. I would put it right there with Addington as far as having so much to say about our lives right now.
I love One Battle After Another with a Fire. I don't know that I knew I could have for film anymore. So I don't know if I'd go that far. But those three films, I think, in wildly different ways are really perfect encapsulations of our time and in indicative of filmmakers who are really, really seriously engaging with our moment and the the variety of output in among those three. Cause even like Eddington and One Battle After Another are not particularly similar films either. Like there's a
Decent amount of sort of artistic variety going on there. Yeah, sure. If you want to do a a f like a film major triptych on if somebody's out there looking for a thesis, like that writing on those three films would be really, really great to do sort of a current events type take on. Let's find a way to wrap there. I don't think we can say it any better than we have. And if we you know we've spent a lot of time talking about this movie, I've enjoyed the shit out of it. I mentioned at the top of the podcast I felt like I was shot out of a cannon.
Doing this episode because I knew there was so much I wanted to say. If this episode ends up running a little bit long, whatever. I make this podcast in part because I really, really enjoy talking about the works of people like Kelly Reichardt. Yeah. And I just feel super grateful. I feel spoiled that all three of the movies you just talked about were from twenty twenty five. That's really true. It feels like we were talking about the death of movies in twenty twenty four. And who knows about the economic fortunes of studios and stuff, but like it feels like a pretty good time to be watching movies and caring about them.
Like there's some really good stuff out there. So, another question we like to ask will we get this movie on physical media? I'm gonna get Luke to start doing that. Yes, day one goes without saying. Huge, huge, huge fan of not just this movie, but now I think I have a total crush on Kelly Reichardt's movies. my God. that's gonna do it for this episode of all those moments. Thanks, Benji. Thank you to our friends at the Magic Lantern. Speaking of the Magic Lantern, for the next episode, we're gonna be watching Clint Bentley's movie.
Train Dreams on November seventh. Looking very forward to that. my god. Special guest for that one. I'm gonna keep that guest a secret for now. We're gonna keep that one in our pockets. Yep. That episode will come out on November 18th. Follow us on YouTube. That's probably the best place where you'll it's a video forward podcast. We I like to include a lot of clips from the the episode. we're also on Instagram and of course anywhere you get podcasts, Apple, Spotify, etc. Until then, thank you all for listening. Thank you, Luke. Thanks, Benji.
In time.
Yes.