American Animals (2018)

Film: American Animals (2018)
Stars: Evan Peters, Barry Keoghan, Blake Jenner, Jared Abrahamson, Udo Kier, Ann Dowd
Director: Bart Layton
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

I'm currently working my way through a few of the 2018 films that I missed in theaters but intrigued me enough to get done before my year-end lists (still figuring out the exact date, but it'll be sometime in mid-January as I'm a critic that doesn't hail from NY/LA, so my access to select movies-looking at you Destroyer and Cold War-is more challenging than my better-located friends on the coasts).  One of the films that I was bummed to miss in theaters was American Animals, a heist film (I'm a huge fan) with a cast of up-and-coming actors (Peters, Keoghan, Jenner) that I've thoroughly enjoyed in the past.  The film meanders and occasionally frustrates, but it's genuinely, truly interesting as there are twists not only in the plot but also in Layton's bold directing style that make it one I'd highly recommend seeing (and learning as little about in the process).

(Spoilers Ahead) The film follows four young, privileged white men who decide to perpetrate a heist at Transylvania University, one of the South's oldest and most prestigious universities (Vice Presidents John Breckenridge and Richard M. Johnson both attended it).   Four students who attend the university, Warren (Peters), Spencer (Keoghan), Chas (Jenner), and Eric (Abrahamson) decide to rob the rare books collection at the school, for reasons that don't entirely make sense (none seems particularly poor, and other than Warren all seem to have promising futures ahead of them in their respective fields).  The film follows them as they execute the heist, essentially making out with nearly a $1 million worth of books and artwork (including a first edition of Darwin's Origin of Species, an illuminated manuscript, a copy of Hortus Sanitatis, and drawings by John James Audubon), but in the process tying-and-gagging the librarian BJ Gooch (Dowd), and then foolishly blundering in the weeks that follow, essentially leading the FBI right to them.

While I like heist films, and there's a certain perverse pleasure in watching such a film & hearing names like Darwin and Audubon uttered, what lends itself well to this movie is the bizarre documentary-style look the film does toward the real-life criminals involved with the heist.  Though it could not remotely be called a documentary (for starters, actors as famous as Peters, Keoghan, and Dowd don't appear as people who recreate scenes in a standard documentary), the film features all four of the real-life men who committed the crime, as well as their parents and (briefly) the librarian whom they assaulted in their crime.

This creates something really fascinating, comparing the actions in the movie to the stories that they tell, with us not able to properly trust any of the narrators.  There are scenes toward the end of the movie where the real-life Spencer admits he doesn't know how much of Warren's version of the events (say, his travels to the Netherlands and his meetings with a prospective buyer of the stolen art) was true, and they cut to the real-life Warren stating, sheepishly "they'll just have to take my word for it."  As a result, the film unfolds in a strange fashion where truth melds with fiction in a way that makes it impossible to know what actually happened, and only the basest of verified facts can be confirmed.  Do we trust the real-life Spencer because of who he is, or because of the character that Barry Keoghan is crafting for us?  It's impossible to tell, and as a result this becomes a pretty daring picture, the likes of which I don't remember seeing.

The film has its problems-the actual fictional aspects occasionally feel repetitive.  It's not a particularly long story taken on the surface (it'd be better-suited for a Vanity Fair article), and the leads aren't compelling in a major way, perhaps why the documentary angle works so well (all of them seemingly had good, stable homes and didn't want for the money, and had promising futures ahead of them).  It's difficult to tell if they didn't understand the damage they were doing, particularly to Gooch, until after the fact or if they just didn't care or if they only cared when the cameras were on.  The film starts out slow, but once Layton starts underlining his bigger points, particularly around the way that these real-life men essentially ruined their lives for nothing (it was clear they'd never get away with such a crime from the very early stages of the robbery), it becomes riveting cinema.  Dowd and Keoghan are the standouts in the cast (as they are almost every time we see them onscreen lately), but Layton is the true star as he begins to reveal his thoughts on the characters in the film, crafting a strong finish.  The end titles, which have Gooch still serving as the rare books librarian and the four men at a lesser position of where they once were, stuck in jobs that require a privilege that a former convict will struggle to attain (artist, writer, etc), is about as fitting as you can find for the end of a documentary.  I'm going with 4 stars, which is bizarre because during the first half I was thinking it was a "waste of time," but Layton's a deceptive, deliberate filmmaker and I'm excited to see more work from him in the future if he has this sort of strongly-executed ambition.