The Mastermind

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

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From the visionary of understatement Kelly Reichardt (“First Cow”), here is a heist story set in the 1970s. With a slow lingering camera, the director captures a snapshot in time of the average man fighting for some degree of status and notoriety within an America rife in unrest. 

Struggling carpenter James (Josh O’Connor) is a regular member of the Framingham Art Museum in Massachusetts. During a day of pronounced boredom, James notices an unlocked drawer, and he pockets a rare historical figurine.

The next day he gets the idea to go after a few paintings. With the help from his friends, James successfully takes a few Arthur Dove paintings from the walls under the nose of a sleeping museum guard.

At first James is elated, thinking himself an accomplished burglar who fought against the status quo. But James ‘s wife Terri (Alana Haim) is less than pleased, saddled with high expenses and under the eye of critical neighbors.

James grows estranged from his wife and becomes restless unable to sleep.

His day-to-day life becomes something Kafkaesque, and his finances sink lower and lower. James contemplates going to Canada alone, but he lacks the courage.

Instead, he spends hour upon hour moving the abstract paintings from one location to another.

Meanwhile, President Nixon drones on in the drab apartment from a grainy black and white television set: subterranean messages from a sinister sea.

Josh O’ Connor is excellent as the morose Everyman who merely wants to feel respected and counted, lost in anonymity and the routine of conformity.

Kelly Reichardt is invariably perfect in her illustrations of the plight of both urban and rural populations, stripped of glare and theatrics, but who possess their own uniqueness and eccentricities through living. The director has a laser focus befitting an anthropologist and she can always be depended on to underscore the common quirk of the human animal.

Write Ian at ianfree11@yahoo.com