ENGAGING TALE OF TRUE AMERICAN IDIOTS
A TITLE card at the start of American Animals declares: ‘This is not based on a true story’, followed quickly by another saying ‘This IS a true story’.
And what a crazy, compelling story it is, the tale of four students at a Kentucky college — the amusingly named Transylvania University in Lexington — who in 2003 decided to carry off an audacious robbery.
The college library houses one of the few intact copies of John James Audubon’s 19th century masterpiece, the 435-page (very large pages) illustrated book, The Birds Of America, worth around $12million.
After arranging a viewing by appointment with librarian Betty Jean Gooch (played by Ann Down
of The Handmaid’s Tale), art student Spencer Reinhard (our own Barry Keoghan) wonders what it would be like to steal this treasure. Like his art, the thought is abstract, but seized upon when he mentions it to his friend Warren Lipka (Evan Peters), a classic slacker who comes over as a real life Bill or Ted, but without the smarts. With the help of two others, their plan falls into place, but it is riddled with flaws — certainly, Googling how to pull off the perfect robbery and leaving a massive digital footprint didn’t exactly make the job of the police overly complicated.
Their first attempt fails, not least because they decide to disguise themselves as elderly men, and look far from convincing.
The second goes wrong too and the jokey tone disappears as the librarian is brutally assaulted, though I’m not sure it was entirely fair to Ms Gooch to show her soiling herself as she lies on the ground. Sometimes, you can have too much realism.
They don’t get to steal the two Audubon volumes (predictably, they forgot how big and heavy they were), but manage to escape with other rare books, then effectively shop themselves by taking the loot to Christie’s in New York, where an appraiser immediately realises they have to have been stolen. Far from American Animals, these boys have more in common with Green Day — they’re just American idiots.
The film is an engaging but ultimately flawed telling of their story by documentary maker Bart Layton.
Perhaps unsure that the drama alone is enough, Layton intersperses it with interviews with the now thirtysomething men themselves, rebuilding their lives after spells in prison.
It all gets particularly silly when they watch their dramatised counterparts in action, blurring the line between the real and the dramatic, a gamble that never entirely pays off.
Keoghan, adding to his already impressive CV, is the emotional soul of the film, a self-contained, privileged but disaffected teen who allows himself to be led by Lipka, whose own charisma is just compensation for a lack of focus.
He’s that friend your parents warn you against, but you hang around with him anyway before realising in later life they were absolutely right.
The joy in the movie comes from the planning, although the problem here is that you already know what actually happened. Consequently, most of the tension that drives a great heist movie — will they? won’t they? — is entirely absent. What you’re left with is a clever character study of what makes good boys do something stupid.
Though, despite the drama and the real-life testimony, you leave the cinema still not entirely sure.