American Animals review: An audacious and twisting heist movie
Director Bart Layton is the man behind 2012’s audacious docu-thriller The Imposter, about a French con artist who bamboozles a Texan family into believing he is their long lost son. The film braided fact and fiction into a chunky dramatic rope, drawing on talking head testimony from the real world players, interspersed with very credible reconstructions by doppelganger actors. It was big-screen Crimewatch, meets true-crime podcast, as told by an unreliable narrator.
American Animals is Layton’s latest, stepping away from pure documentary format and into some more directly dramatic storytelling, following the true story of four students who broke into the library of a Kentucky liberal arts college to steal rare books worth millions.
We’re introduced to them as they’re donning disguises before the big heist. Occasionally interrupting the action are their present day real selves, ghosts of the future appearing as talking heads to recount the events from their own biased perspectives. So when we meet Spencer Reinhard (Barry Keoghan) as an innocent young painter in search of some life-altering event that would give his art meaning, his reported motivation for jeopardising his freedom for a book-heist can be questioned.
The smudged historical accuracy is toyed with in scenes where two interviewees give contradicting details of the same event. One disputed conversation, between Reinhard and his clownish co-conspirator Warren Lipka (Evan Peters), takes place in both Lipka’s car and at a friend’s party simultaneously. All of this is in service of some greater moral about the subjectivity of truth and the ephemeral nature of memory.
It’s too clever by half, and Layton seems to undersell his own chops as a director of suspenseful, straight-shooting drama. American Animals is at its most enjoyable not while it’s interrogating its smooth criminal historians, but when it’s revelling in reconstructing a high-stress heist. An Ocean’s Eleven style dream sequence in which the group, choreographed and sharply dressed in tailored suits, artfully rob the library to the tune of A Little Less Conversation, doesn’t need the conceit of a fanciful narrator to fit into this script. And the playful incompetence of the group as they cobble together their plans isn’t helped along by hand-wringing over the minutia of who saw what.
The uncannily well-cast leading men and the slow, nerve-shredding intensity of their low-key book-swiping antics is enough to power American Animals all by themselves. It’s great filmmaking regardless, but to wonder whether what you’re seeing actually took place is an unnecessary layer, and an eventually unwelcome distraction.