A complex real-crime drama
of ornithological prints, disguise themselves – badly – as elderly men?
The answer to the last question, at least, is yes. Written and directed by Bart Layton, American Animals is fascinating, funny and, in the end, deep. It’s a thematic cousin to the English filmmaker’s similarly probing and improbable The Imposter, a 2012 documentary about a young French man who presented himself, falsely, to the mother of a missing Texas child as her long-lost son.
Both films interrogate the notion of crime, guilt and a certain, disturbingly American, spirit of absurdity.
The answers to the other two questions are more elusive.
American Animals differs from The Imposter in that it is lightly fictionalised. The words “This not a true story” appear on-screen at the start, only to have the “not” disappear, indicating a relationship with the truth that acknowledges its aspirational qualities.
American Animals is based on interviews with the perpetrators: in this case, Spencer Reinhard, Warren Lipka, Eric Borsuk and Chas Allen, whose often contradictory accounts of their crime are peppered throughout the film, guiding us through the re-enactments, even as they call them into question.
At times, the four men briefly appear alongside the actors who portray them (respectively, Barry Keoghan, Evan Peters, Jared Abrahamson and Blake Jenner), lending the film an additional patina of surrealism. They are not just tellers of the tall tale, Layton suggests, but participants in it.
That embrace of factuality’s slippery nature lends the film a delirious headiness, turning what might have been just another truecrime story into something more philosophical and complex.
At its core, American Animals is most interested in this question: What is it about these four examples of the American millennial – all products of Lexington’s elite high schools – that led to their sense of entitlement and impunity? – The Washington Post