AMERICAN ANIMALS: A Portrait Of American Ugliness

Anyone who has ever watched a heist film has probably contemplated how they would pull one off in real life, but very few have actually used heist films as how-to guides in their own misguided attempts to get rich at the expense of others. The story of the four young men who attempted to steal priceless books from the library at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky is the rare exception.

That stranger-than-fiction story is the subject of American Animals, a hybrid drama-documentary from director Bart Layton that explores what drove these four seemingly average young men to commit such an audacious crime. But despite Layton’s sharp sense of style as a filmmaker, American Animals is just as likely to irritate as to entertain.

The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry…

Spencer (Barry Keoghan of Dunkirk and The Killing of a Sacred Deer) is an aspiring artist studying at Transylvania University. His childhood friend and unabashed loose cannon, Warren (Evan Peters of the X-Men franchise) is at the University of Kentucky on a sports scholarship that he has been working towards for almost his entire life. Yet both Spencer and Warren find themselves uninterested in what society expects from them and full of a desire to rebel and achieve something far more exciting than a four-year degree.

So, when Spencer visits the special collections at Transylvania University’s library and discovers that rare prints by Audubon and precious editions of Darwin’s The Origin of Species are under the care of one librarian (Ann Dowd), the two of them start plotting to rob the library.

Unable to execute their plan alone, Spencer and Warren recruit detail-oriented accounting student Eric (Jared Abrahamson) and athletic golden boy Chas (Blake Jenner) to join the heist. They’ll schedule an appointment with the librarian to view the rare books, disguised as old men. They’ll then disable the librarian with a Taser – a responsibility that none of them are eager to take on – and make off with the books through the library’s basement.

They’ll then have them appraised at Christie’s before selling them to a shady Dutch middleman (played by German legend Udo Kier) and raking in their millions. It’s an utterly ludicrous plan, fueled by too many hours of watching heist films and a whole lot of toxic masculinity. Needless to say, things don’t unfold the way Spencer and Warren expected.

It’s a documentary! It’s a drama! It’s a documentary and a drama!

Layton does something with American Animals that one typically doesn’t see in films based on true stories: he intercuts footage of his actors reenacting the crime with traditional documentary-style “talking heads” segments featuring the real people who his actors are portraying. One will often see the real-life participants in a true story at the end of a film like American Animals; to see them throughout instead is a bold choice. But thanks to Layton’s background in documentary filmmaking, this unusual stylistic decision makes sense and is executed far better than one may have expected.

As the real-life Spencer and Warren proceed to contradict the other’s version of events in their separate interview segments, scenes involving the fictional Spencer and Warren subtly warp and change to suit the story of whoever happens to be speaking at that moment. If one of them says they were talking in a car, the actors will be talking in a car, but if the other says that they were, in fact, talking at a party, the conversation will seamlessly shift to that new location as though they had in fact been talking there all along.

As Spencer struggles to recall what the mysterious man Warren met in New York looked like, the man’s appearance changes throughout the fictionalized recreation of the scene. These moments drive home the often surprisingly fluid nature of fiction and nonfiction, and how one person’s memory of a series of events can differ entirely from another person’s despite them both being there at the same time.

The anxieties of middle-class white men

Yet despite this intriguing storytelling device, when it comes down to it, I just didn’t empathize with the protagonists of American Animals. I found it difficult to care about their apparent plight, which was nothing more substantial than being bored and impatient to achieve something. So many twenty-somethings feel that way, especially during the dog days of college, but not all of them decide to take a shortcut to success by breaking the law.

[SPOILER ALERT] Am I supposed to admire these guys for doing so? Am I supposed to feel bad that they got caught? Am I supposed to feel uplifted at the end when the film tells us what they’re all doing with their lives right now? The ensemble cast is a who’s who of talented young actors, yet even Keoghan’s introspective charm and Peters’ wild-eyed charisma aren’t enough to make one actually like Spencer and Warren.

When I look at the four young men at the center of American Animals, I see four middle-class white men who could not and perhaps still don’t comprehend their own privilege. If they were men of color, would they have gotten off with only a few years in prison and the chance to start over with a new job and education opportunities? Would they have had a movie made about them, offering them a path to redemption? I don’t know.

What I do know is that American Animals left me with a bitter taste in my mouth that could not be washed away even by my respect for the unique way that Layton chose to tell this story.

American Animals: Conclusion

The stylistic gambles that Layton takes in American Animals pay off in that they add depth to what is a shallow story about young American ennui. However, the movie’s artistic merits are not enough to make the men at the center of the story worth caring about for its duration.

What do you think? Does American Animals sound like an intriguing real-life heist film or an ode to all of the worst things about American youth? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

American Animals was released in theaters in the U.S. on June 1, 2018 and will be released in the UK on September 7, 2018. You can find more international release dates here.