UNLIKELY HEIST NOT QUITE BY THE BOOK
When four students decided to steal millions of dollars in rare books from a Kentucky university library in 2004, they were inspired by Ocean’s 11 and plotted out the heist like it was a movie. Well, now it is one.
Writer-director Bart Layton’s American Animals opens with the words “This is not based on a true story,” with some of those words fading out to reveal: “This is a true story.”
Vanity Fair ran a piece about the crime in 2015 if you don’t mind spoilers, but this review will assume you don’t know whether the four crooks ultimately made good.
They certainly don’t seem like good crooks. Evan Peters (X-men’s Quicksilver) and Barry Keoghan (the civilian kid in Dunkirk) play Warren Lipka and Spencer Reinhard, the first two members of the quartet.
But we also see interviews with the actual men, sometimes struggling to recall the details of their plan and just why the heck they decided to even attempt it.
It started as something of a pot-fuelled lark, after Spencer saw the books during a tour of the library. He planned a nighttime raid, until one of his co-conspirators pointed out that, with only old Betty Jean Gooch (Ann Dowd) acting as a guard, it would be simpler to walk off with them during opening hours.
The boys were inspired by the movies, and Layton follows suit. He shows them watching films both on the nose (1968’s The Thomas Crown Affair) and of dubious utility — Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which really only helps if you’ve robbed a train and have to get away from a super posse on horseback.
Little nods to heist movies dot the action. There’s Elvis Presley’s A Little Less Conversation, made famous by Ocean’s 11, on the soundtrack. Someone quotes Catch Me If You Can and, less appropriately, Jaws. And in a detail lifted from real life, the boys give themselves the same colour-coded aliases as in Reservoir Dogs. Maybe they didn’t see the ending of that one?
American Animals is Layton’s feature debut. He hails from the documentary world and in 2012 directed a crackerjack tale, The Imposter, about a 23-year-old
Algerian drifter who tried to pass himself off as the missing 16-year-old son of a Texas family.
The true-life story of American Animals makes a natural progression, but Layton seems uncertain what tone he’s going for. Cutting frequently between the actors and their real-life counterparts today gives the whole affair an I, Tonya flair, and there are some truly comedic moments, as when the thieves discover what anyone who has ever moved house knows about the weight of books, rare or otherwise. But there are also scenes where we feel real fear for these characters, and what starts as a comedy of errors sometimes twists into a drama of errors instead, particularly as the boys get deeper into their plan.