…you know the movie is going to be a bit of a chore to sit through, unless it’s been directed by Alice Rohrwacher. You also know he’ll be playing a guy who wears the same pair of smelly socks two or thee days in a row. One look at O’Connor and a certain Paul McCartney lyric comes to mind…”man, I can smell your feet a mile away.”
Talk about dead-in-the-water Kelly Reichardt movies…here’s another one.
Posted from Cannes on 5.23.25:
Why did Kelly Reichardt make a 1970 art heist film?, you’re asking yourself. Or an anti-heist film, which a certain Reichardt cultist is calling it.
Because The Mastermind, which I sat through several hours ago, is basically about a married, middle-class, not-smart-enough jerkoff — Josh O’Connor‘s James Blaine Mooney, or “JB” — being so inept at organizing a theft of some Arthur Dove paintings from a museum in Framingham that he’s unmistakably in the running for the sloppiest felon in motion picture history, and I mean right up there with Al Pacino‘s Sonny Wortzik in Dog Day Afernoon.
We know going in, of course, that Reichardt doesn’t do genre stuff and that The Mastermind, which is being praised, of course…we know her film will be exploring something else. It certainly isn’t Rififi, for sure. But what is it?
Reichardt is primarily interested in JB’s life being blown to smithereens when the half-assed robbery goes wrong. But why? Is it about JB’s subconscious attempt to punish himself for marrying Alana Haim‘s Terri and having two boys with her and…I don’t know, feeling trapped by this? Is he looking to thumb his nose at his straightlaced parents (played by Bill Camp and Hope Davis)?
It certainly seems to be about a form of convoluted self-destruction.
JB winds up on the run, penniless, scrounging around, snatching an old lady’s cash-filled handbag and finally being arrested during an anti-war demonstration. But to what end?
The Mastermind asks “how would a born-to-lose guy go about escaping from his life?” Suicide would be the simplest way, of course, but JB seems to lack the necessary character and conviction to put a pistol in his mouth. If he wants to join up with some hippies and run away to Hawaii or Mexico or Central America, why doesn’t he just do that? Why go to the trouble of hiring a pair of young fuck-ups to steal the paintings, knowing that in all likelihood one or both will eventually screw up and get popped and rat him out?
All I know is that The Mastermind has a little story tension going on during the first 75 minutes or so, but once the jig is up and JB goes on the lam, it has nowhere to go. The last shot of JB in a police paddy wagon conveys a little something, but the film basically peters out.
I don’t want to say any more. The film isn’t dull or uninteresting — O’Connor is always good in a grubby, glint-of-madness sort of way — but it’s basically a wash. For me, at least, but then I’m not a cultist.
“History of Sound” Is Nicely Done But Chaste, Subdued to a Fault,” posted from Cannes on 5.21.25:
]Early this month I confessed to being a little bit concerned about seeing Oliver Hermanus and Ben Shattuck‘s The History of Sound, a period gay romance starring Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor.
I wasn’t exactly afraid of any chowing-down scenes, but I knew I’d be a wee bit antsy about anything too graphic. I mainly wanted The History of Sound to be as good as Luca Guadagnino‘s Queer, but I knew this would be a tall order.
I emerged from a Debussy press screening of The History of Sound about an hour ago, and my initial reaction, much to my surprise, was “where’s the vitality…the primal passion?”
I’m not saying I wanted to see Mescal lick up more cum droplets (as he did in All Of Us Strangers), but there hasn’t been a more earnestly delicate, suppressive, bordering-on-bloodless film about erotic entanglement since David Lean‘s A Passage to India (’84) and before that Alfred Hitchcock‘s Marnie(’64).
Come to think of it, Marnie at least has that one scene when Sean Connery rips off Tippi Hedren‘s bathrobe, leaving her buck naked.
A History of Sound delivers a welcomely non-graphic sex scene early on, but that’s all she wrote.
The History of Sound is a gay romance made for older straight guys like me, I suppose, but even I was thinking “Jesus, I never thought I’d complain about this thing being too tasteful and hemmed in.”
Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman has called it “listless and spiritually inexpressive…Brokeback Mountain on sedatives.”
The heart of the film is when lovers Lionel (Mescal) and David (O’Connor) go hiking around rural Maine in boots and backpacks and carrying a wax cylinder sound-recording device, the idea being to record rural types singing folk tunes.
Except this happens in the winter months, and if you’ve ever been to Maine between December and late April…well, c’mon! Not to mention the lack of bathtubs or showers on such a trek, which means smelly feet and gunky crotch aromas after a few days. Who the hell would do such a thing? During the summer maybe…
O’Connor’s role is smaller than Mescal’s but the former exerts more feeling somehow…more command. Mescal’s Lionel is supposed to be a native Kentuckian, but he doesn’t sound or look country-ish. (Imagine if he’d played Lionel in the manner of Gary Cooper‘s Alvin York, who hailed from Tennessee around the same time.)
Mescal is basically playing a master of emotional constipation who doesn’t behave in a manner that suggests “1920s gay guy”…he’s very, very committed to keeping it all buttoned inside…the relationship with O’Connor’s David is highly charged and drilled, and yet they part company and Lionel moves to Italy and then England to teach music.
And then, while in England, Lionel flirts with the idea of being in love with with Emma Canning‘s Clarissa, a to-the-manor-born British lass who seems to love him unconditionally, only to blow their relationship off in order to return to Maine and possibly hook up with David again.
Which is totally nuts, of course. There was no percentage in living an openly gay life in the 1920s, so the smart move for Lionel would have been to marry wealthy Clarissa and, in the manner of Heath Ledger‘s camping trips with Jake Gyllenhaal in Brokeback Mountain, visit O’Connor for annual vacations and whatnot.