Kelly Reichardt is an essential voice in American independent cinema. In fact, she might just be the voice. Over the course of nine features, Reichardt has crafted a style so singular in modern moviemaking that it almost seems as archaic and quaint as the lives of her many modest, diligent protagonists. Managing to never compromise her vision in service to any reboot or reimagining, Reichardt tells small stories with big themes. Her movies move through time and space in a way that makes most filmmakers—and, frankly, many audience members—uncomfortable, searching not for some grand, didactic catharsis, but hardscrabble, weary acceptance.
It should be noted that she’s also one of the most important female directors of all time, centering many of these stories on the sort of women who the medium of film and society more broadly tends to ignore—women whose successes and failures neither justify nor condemn their place in the world. Naturally, in an attempt to look at both Reichardt’s fascinating career and newest film, the pseudo-heist story The Mastermind, I want to talk about the dudes. That’s right, I’m going to be the one brave enough to ignore Reichardt’s nuanced, thoughtful, frustrated, and sublime leading ladies in favor of figuring out what in the hell is wrong with all of these goddamn men. “I always wondered what, say, John Wayne in The Searchers must have looked like to the woman cooking his stew,” Reichardt told The Guardian around the release of 2010’s Meek’s Cutoff, getting at the core of how important the female gaze is to understanding her entire filmography.
When it comes to the myth of the American man, there’s really no competition for the ten-gallon-hatted, spur-spinning, horse-bucking man of the Western. And whether they know it or not, every man in Reichardt’s story of three families’ tortuous journey across the American West is enacting some piece of that myth. Whether it’s the stoicism of the gaggle of feckless husbands constantly assuring the women they do, in fact, know best, or the titular Meek himself—hardheaded, arrogant, covered in dirt—these are men intent on protecting their fragile egos even at the cost of their lives. There’s certainly a distinct metaphor to be unpacked in the way Meek roundly dismisses the aid of their Native captive, and how striking the comparison between this American desert is to a certain Middle-Eastern soil, but Reichardt’s fable-like stories are never so simple. Any resemblance is more universal than coincidental. Meek is not an exception to American masculinity, but the rule.
In many ways, 2020’s First Cow is the perfect foil to Meek’s Cutoff. Once again wearing the garb of a period Western, First Cow is less concerned with the hardheaded idiocy of the American man than with the tendency of the world to stamp out anything in opposition. The film’s hero, Cookie, is perhaps the most tender, thoughtful presence in any of Reichardt’s films, which makes his existence among the unsentimental, harsh frontier landscape so devastating. Named for his culinary skills, Cookie is almost maternal in his instincts. When he meets up with fellow outsider King-Lu, he’s quick to grab a broom, straighten up, and gather flowers for a vase. Reichardt presents this in her deliberate style, allowing the viewer to understand Cookie not in what is said, but in the way he mixes a batter, milks a cow, or scuffs his new boots to adhere to manly standards. Cookie is not John Wayne, but the vestigial tail of the American Man mythos—not permitted to thrive (or, ultimately, survive) in his pure, wildflower-picking state.
2013’s Night Moves is a little thornier. On the surface, this tale of three climate activists trading rhetoric for action in a move of explosive terror is the sort of story that might provide a righteous pedestal from which to preach. Instead, the characters of Reichardt’s film—namely the two men who serve as the ostensible brains behind the operation—are sniveling, jealous, angry, paranoid, foolhardy, and self-involved. You have Jesse Eisenberg’s Josh, a man of repressed emotion and idealistic notions. He cares deeply about the cause and wears his frustration on his sleeve. It becomes clear that he also definitely wants to sleep with his young protégé, Dena, though he would never once make that desire plain. Then there’s Peter Sarsgaard’s Harmon, the sort of angry reactionary who sees no means as unjustifiable and cares about the cause the way a drunk guy at a bar cares about someone disrespecting his woman. He also wants to sleep with Dena, and does. We don’t have to wait for things to go wrong to know that these two will easily slide from ally to threat if necessary, no matter how good their perceived politics.
J.B. Mooney, the center of Reichardt’s newest film, is neither hero nor villain, but something far more common. The Mastermind, which involves a low-level art theft and subsequent manhunt, is very much of its time, the changing moods of 1970s suburbia always at the corner of Reichardt’s frame. There’s a world where Mooney, an out-of-work carpenter fed up with the game of upward mobility and looking for a big score, is as slick, cool, and whip-smart as he believes himself to be, but Reichardt is quick to dispel this myth. Mooney only thinks he has everything figured out, and O’Connor’s quiet, sly charm convinces us, for a moment, that he might. But as the plan begins to unravel it becomes clear that he’s nothing but a child playing dress-up. This is made even more clear as he begins his life as a wayward vagabond, trading his sweatered, northeastern prep-boy look for a poor approximation of Chalamet-as-Dylan, all the while complaining about the idea of hanging out with beatniks and draft-dodgers. His arrogance and detachment, which only grow as he traverses the country looking for anyone who might help him out of his jam, is nothing but window-dressing for a man with no ideology, a rebel without a clue.
These men act either in direct neglect or ignorance of the women in their lives. Even a film as devoid of women as First Cow sees two groups of warring men milking the titular star dry by its end.
As with so many of Reichardt’s men, Mooney’s ignorance is only really allowed to flourish because of the inherent privilege in his upper-middle-class upbringing. 2008’s Wendy and Lucy explores how rickety that scaffolding can be for someone decidedly not in Mooney’s position. We know from the jump that Wendy, sleeping in her car with plans of making her way to Canada, is on precarious footing, but it’s the way Reichardt juxtaposes her journey with those of the unwavering men around her that puts her situation into greater relief. Take the grocery store clerk in the film’s first act who sets the plot into motion, all-but forcing his boss to call the police on Wendy for stealing dog food. Not only is his indignation anything but righteous, but we later see him picked up from work by his mother, sneering at Wendy and flaunting his unearned position as moral arbiter, fully equipped with the knowledge that he’ll never be put into her situation.
Later on, in the closest thing Reichardt has made to a horror scene, the threat of what this type of privilege provides is made more plain. Wendy—alone, exhausted, and sleeping on a few blankets deep in the woods—is awoken in the middle of the night by a man rummaging through her things. Reichardt doesn’t need to do anything but stretch the tension of this scene, the camera largely trained on Michelle Williams’ frozen eyes to express the fear and dejection pummeling Wendy in these moments.
It’s notable that even The Mastermind—a film centered on a man on the run from the FBI—never puts its protagonist in such harrowing circumstances. In fact, even at the film’s definitive and riotously funny end, you could argue that Mooney’s wife, half a country away with two kids who’ll never again know their father, is stuck in a worse situation than our antihero. It’s this, more than anything, that categorizes Reichardt’s century’s-wide exploration of masculinity. In almost every case, these men act either in direct neglect or ignorance of the women in their lives. Even a film as devoid of women as First Cow centers on a plot which sees two groups of warring men milking the titular star dry by its end. Whether they’re direct threats, silly dreamers, or delusional narcissists, the men of Kelly Reichardt’s universe will simply never stop menning, and the self-proclaimed Mastermind is no exception.
