A deft depiction of criminal incompetence
Bart Layton Evan Peters, Barry Keoghan, Blake Jenner, Ann Dowd, Udo Kier, Jared Abrahamson
The last film Bart Layton made was 2012’s The Imposter, a coolly self-aware documentary with dramatic inserts, telling the story of a notorious French con man called Jacques Bourdin. In the smashingly enjoyable American Animals, he flips the balance: this one is largely a dramatised account of a real-life heist at a college library, with interruptions from the actual participants.
The incident in question was the attempted theft of rare books from Kentucky’s Transylvania University in 2004 by four young men. Separately interviewed, they disagree on many of the details, but the seed of the idea came from Spencer (Barry Keoghan), a detached art student impressed by the treasures on display, particularly an ultra-valuable edition of The Birds of America, by John James Audubon.
When he mentions the special books room, guarded by a single female librarian, to his sketchy pal Warren (Evan Peters), the idea of escaping their humdrum lives with danger, adventure and vast wealth appeals to the fantasist in both of them. Warren flies to Amsterdam on a recce, to see how much the books would fetch on the black market. And a plan comes together. They need two other cohorts – an additional bag man, and a getaway driver (Jared Abrahamson and a perpetually angry Blake Jenner). But no one except Warren can stomach the one truly nasty part of the operation, which is incapacitating Betty Jean Gooch (Ann Dowd), the unsuspecting custodian of the loot.
It could have made for an entirely straightforward heist movie, or indeed a straight doc. It’s in blurring the two that Layton wants to scratch away at the tricky nature of truth, breaking into this story, especially at first, with corrections and demurrals from the only people who truly know what went down. At one point, achieved with a simple, blithe camera move, the real-life Warren pops up in the passenger seat next to the actor playing him, and disputes the whole scene. These disruptions give the film comic energy and a veneer of scepticism – it constantly trips itself up on purpose.
That said, it’s not quite as fresh or clever as it thinks. The film does little to get us, conceptually, beyond Akira Kurosawa’s nearly-70-years-old Rashomon, with its multiple perspectives. Some late plot twists have an anticlimactic quality. It’s the style and performances, rather than the pseudo-experimental structure Layton has chosen, that keep the film grabby.
Up to a point, it’s about heist movies – the guys watch dozens of them in preparation, and name themselves after the characters in Reservoir Dogs: Mr Pink, Mr Black and so on. When Warren lays out his imaginary plan of attack, they swan into action in slo-mo, with hardly a hair out of place – it’s the film’s kickiest sequence, a parody of pulling things off with sangfroid. Peters, especially, with his twerpy grin and rather douchey charisma, holds up this ain’t-it-cool side of things. His remorse for the injuries he inflicted on Miss Gooch – a peachy Dowd cameo, with an air of unearned self-importance – provides almost the only emotional note in the movie: the moral line crossed between larceny and inflicting harm on a human being is quite keenly explored.
Layton ratchets up the tension around that moment to near-sickening degrees, reminding you how riveting a heist can be without anything of Ocean’s 11’s breezy showmanship. If anything, it’s all the more nail-biting precisely because no one on screen has a single clue what they’re doing.