Living with his wife and children in an ordinary suburban house, James appears to be a quiet family man. Yet he convinces two friends to join him in a heist. His goal is to steal four paintings from a museum he has been visiting for days, convinced that he knows its every nook and cranny. But just hours before the robbery, one of his friends backs out, and soon after, other setbacks follow one after another. The supposedly flawless plan spirals into disaster, and James drifts away from his family toward an uncertain future.

Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind is a quintessential example of her signature minimalist style, and, as one might guess, it is an anti-heist film. The thrills we normally expect from the genre — gunfights, displays of masculinity, and acts of heroism — are deliberately absent. By stripping her film of these clichés, Reichardt shifts the focus elsewhere. The character of James, tossed about by the course of events, becomes a lens through which to observe and understand America in the year 1970. Despite his poor decisions, James views himself as a mastermind, echoing the incompetence of the American government during the Vietnam War, whose controversial choices loom constantly in the film’s background.