Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
American Animals
Crime is not a rational career choice for privileged people. Most criminals act out of desperation or stupidity. For the most part, the elaborately planned, timedto-the-second heist where no one gets hurt is a Hollywood fantasy. Yet Hollywood fantasies inform us all.
And so sometimes weird things happen in real life.
In 2004, four upper middle class college kids from elite high schools with bright futures decided to pull a caper in Kentucky. They robbed the rare books collection at Transylvania University in Lexington, taking books and manuscripts valued at around $5 million.
They did not get away with it for long.
Writer-director Bart Layton’s American Animals is an audacious and breezy recounting of this incredible crime that’s partly (and unreliably) narrated by the real- life malefactors who, weirdly, seem more charismatic than the competent actors who play them. But it’s the testimony of one of their very real victims that rescues this smart meta-movie from moral fecklessness.
Spencer Reinhard ( Barry Keoghan, The Killing of a Sacred Deer) is a talented artist who is just beginning his studies at Transylvania, a small liberal arts school in the shadow of the University of Kentucky. During a tour of the library, he’s intrigued by a first edition of John James Audubon’s The Birds of America. More as a thought
experiment than anything else, he proposes stealing it to his friend, jockish Warren Lipka (Evan Peters), a U.K. freshman who’s in danger of losing his athletic scholarship and generally having trouble adjusting to college life, probably because his parents are going through a divorce.
Soon the two are renting heist movies, surveying the library and going over “what if?” scenarios in their heads. Spencer draws up some beautiful blueprints and Warren finds a new direction for his life. Layton makes imagining and preparing a big score look like great fun, especially when you know all along that it’s just a fantasy.
But the deeper they go, they harder it becomes to find reasons not to act. Their plan becomes more and more plausible, and Warren eventually finds himself in Amsterdam meeting with a potential fence. Things get even more real when they recruit two accomplices: Eric Borsuk (Jared Abrahamson), a math wiz with whom Warren has a rocky history, and buff, brash Chas Allen II (Blake Jenner), a budding young entrepreneur.
They formulate a detailed but fairly straightforward plan. Their chief problem presents as Betty Jean Gooch (Ann Dowd), the librarian assigned to the rare books collection. She will have to be dealt with — though they imagine that won’t be hard.
They put on silly disguises. They synchronize their watches ….
And it’s probably fair to say that they turned out to be as dumb and cruel as most criminals, though we’re initially supposed to take them for nice kids because of their upbringings and the way the movie has asked us into their lives. But the best thing Layton does here is refuse to romanticize these characters; for all the gee-whiz pop cutting and bouncy (though a little too on-the-nose) pop songs on the soundtrack, American Animals is more tragedy than action comedy.
It doesn’t quite work all the time, but give Layton credit for understanding the essential selfishness of his characters’ actions and for crediting the real terror and damage they dealt out. It’s all a party until someone gets hurt. And someone always gets hurt.