Susan Granger’s review of “American Animals” (The Orchard/MoviePass Ventures)
Ostensibly an entirely true story, this misadventure follows four, upper-middle-class college students who, back in December, 2004, planned one of the most audacious art heists in U.S. history.
Hidden in the Special Collections Library at Transylvania College in Lexington, Kentucky, and guarded by dutiful librarian Betty Jean Gooch (Ann Dowd) are rare folios of John James Audubon’s “Birds of America” and a first edition of Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species.”
They become the targets of jittery, wannabe artist Spencer Reinhard (Barry Keoghan) and volatile, sociopathic Warren Lipka (Evan Peters), who enlist two other acquaintances – fitness fanatic Charles “Chas” Allen II (Blake Jenner) and accounting expert Eric Borsuk (Jared Abrahamson) – to join them in this theft.
Related from their multiple perspectives, including those of their older, wiser, real-life counterparts and their bewildered parents, plus the hapless librarian, British writer/director Burt Layton meticulously reconstructs the entire operation – from its fanciful beginning to its ignominious conclusion.
After obtaining Library blueprints, they devise ways to circumvent the surveillance equipment, clear an escape route thru the ‘staff only’ elevator, obtain ‘elderly’ disguises (which they eventually discard) and make elaborate plans about how to ‘fence’ the stolen property after they make their getaway in the midst of final exams.
Much of this is inspired by ‘researching’ Stanley Kubrick’s “The Killing,” along with “The Sting,” “The Thomas Crown Affair,” “Ocean’s Eleven,” “The Getaway,” “Snatch,” “Goodfellas” and Quentin Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs.”
Harking back to his 2012 hybrid-documentary “The Impostor,” which fuses fact with fantasy, Burt Layton, collaborating with cinematographer Ole Bratt Birkeland and editor Nick Fenton, blurs memory with reality, often intercutting what may-or-may-not have actually happened in Manhattan and Amsterdam, as their felony is viewed from hindsight.
“We did the robbery as a way to escape,” one admits. “I think we all knew that we wanted something different, and we had to break away from where we were living…”
On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “American Animals” is a shallow, if stylishly suspenseful 6, relating a criminal caper that goes awry.
