Runtime: 1 hour, 56 minutes
Rating: R
Director: Bart Layton
Quick Impressions:
When I was in grad school at the University of Texas, I took a class on paratext that met in the Harry Ransom Center, (the rare books library/archive on campus that houses a daunting and vast collection of valuable manuscripts). Security in there is pretty strict. You have to leave bags and purses in a locker, present an ID, sign in, give a reason for being there. Just about anyone (with a reason) is welcome to use library’s resources, but you must follow the protocols in place. You may request to see a book. Its retrieval takes some time. They’re very particular about how you handle the books and what kinds of paper you take in and out of the reading room. You don’t just waltz in the front door and start stuffing your purse with Gutenberg Bibles.
But one day as I was waiting in the hallway outside the security check for class to start, I happened to notice an odd amount of commotion going on in the building. As it turns out, that day some government agency happened to be returning multiple volumes that had been stolen from the HRC in a rare books heist about a decade earlier.
When I found out, I thought that was about the most exciting thing I’d heard in my entire life (or at least, that day).
I’m an extremely honest person, but the idea of fine art heists has always excited me. Until then, I had never given much thought to stealing rare books.
“But where would you sell them?” I’d wondered. “They’re so rare. Surely everyone interested would know that they were stolen.”
Yes, exactly. Apparently the perpetrators had eventually been caught because it’s not exactly easy to find a buyer for extremely rare, obviously stolen books.
Imagine standing on the street corner yelling, “Hey, anybody wanna buy the Mona Lisa?”
I mean, you’d find takers, but you wouldn’t be in any position to negotiate a fair price, and then you’d get arrested.
If you put any thought into the problem at all, you realize that there’s no point stealing valuable artworks (including rare books and manuscripts) unless you’ve already got a good relationship with a fantastic fence or, optimally, an unscrupulous private buyer (who is not secretly an FBI informant).
Nevertheless, after that day, I never went into the HRC without imagining stealing the books. Not me stealing them, mind you. I’m too much of a conscience driven empath for a life of crime. (I’m pretty paranoid, too. That would surely work against me.)
But all my work in the HRC after that was ruined. No matter what actual project I went in there to work on (including my dissertation), all I ever wanted to do once I got inside was plot novels involving heists, murder, and other rare books related crimes. It’s so beautifully silent in there. You can hear the crisp, crackling pages turn. Anything could happen.
Honestly, if I weren’t so overflowing with morality and torment, I would definitely love a life of high stakes thievery. Planning a heist seems so fun. Even pickpocketing has a kind of street magic appeal. I was obsessed with Oliver! as a young child and used to drive my father crazy by answering only to Nancy (which is not my name), speaking in a cockney accent, and “stealing” (aka hiding) his watch, wallet, keys. He’d tear at his hair, demanding to know where they were. I’d perform a rousing musical number. A good time was had by all (except him).
I love pretending to be a thief. In reality, I have never stolen anything, not even as a child. (I have so many flaws, but I am not a thief.) I think stealing from others is disgusting and wrong (unless you are taking from true, dire need, in which case you are not actually stealing, and the rest of us have failed you, and God bless you).
So I went into this movie extremely enthralled by the topic and also curious about how they were going to handle the morality angle. That’s what deters me from crime. You have to hurt other people, not to mention disappoint those who care about you.
American Animals delivered everything my curiosity and conscience craved. It’s really a fabulous movie. It plays with Hitchock and heist films and the grand cinematic tradition of young men doing stupid things. But in the end, it also shows us the reality of the situation, what it truly means to rob someone, how that affects everyone involved.
The Good:
What an unusual way to tell a story!
“It’s like I, Tonya, but it takes it to the next level,” my husband observed, commenting on the writer/director’s unusual choice to incorporate both ordinary movie scenes with actors and documentary style interviews with the (now older) criminals themselves.
This style (along with the clever announcement at the beginning that this is a true story) definitely gives us a clear expectation of how the story will end.
But sometimes it’s hard to imagine how we’ll ever reach that end. For something based on real events with a known outcome, the story is surprisingly suspenseful. Maybe I’m an outlier, but I actually gasped out loud and squirmed in my seat during moments of heightened suspense.
My thoughts were a mix of the following: “How will they get away?” “Wait, how can they get away?” and, “Oh my gosh! Why aren’t they putting on gloves to handle those rare books?” (That’s the erstwhile academic in me shining through, I guess.)
Ordinarily, in a heist movie, we watch and ask ourselves, “How will they pull it off?”
But in this case, we know up front that they were caught, so we wonder, “Why didn’t they pull it off? What goes wrong? When will it go wrong?” It’s quite compelling. You wait the whole movie for the moment to happen.
I love, too, the idea the film suggests about (not) being able to steal specialness. It’s so interesting that the guys disguise themselves with old age make-up. (I love old age make-up. My sophomore year of high school, I played sex-crazed matriarch Penny Sycamore in You Can’t Take It With You, and a nice perk was that before every show the guy who played Kolenkhov would say, “Come on, Penny,” take me aside, and apply my old age make-up for me. This wasn’t any kind of flirtation. He just seemed genuinely pleased that I appreciated his skills in making me look like the mother of the ingenue.) But these guys want to be special, so they find the most special thing they can see (the rare books) and try to (literally) take them in order to gain their specialness. And as part of this ritual to gain specialness, they make themselves appear to be old (like the specialness they are trying to take). They don’t want to take the years necessary to have genuine experiences. They fake their old age and grasp at the specialness with hands too young for their faces.
Warren’s ongoing obsession with specialness alternately intrigued and annoyed me. At one point, I wanted to say to him, “Hey look, Bub! Don’t go trying to pin this on Mr. Rogers. The adults who told you that you were special never added, ‘Now get out there, tiger, and tase a librarian.'”
So the themes are intriguing, and our ability to be simultaneously sympathetic to and frustrated by the protagonists is a point in the film’s favor.
The performances are excellent all around. I was excited to see Blake Jenner from my daughter’s one-time favorite show Supergirl. (I kept struggling to recognize him through the whole thing.) Evan Peters is good enough here to launch himself into an Oscars orbit. (I doubt he will be nominated for this, but surely he’ll get the type of attention that will result in his casting in future prestige pictures.)
I also love the way we’re introduced to the significance of the title. I’m a sucker for heavy-handed, “Hey! Look! Here’s where the title comes from!” moments. This one is quite artfully done.
The score, I actually only noticed once, during Spencer’s flamingo run. I liked it then.
Best Scene Visually:
Visually ambitious is probably the most accurate way to describe the look of this film. Cinematographer Ole Bratt Birkeland does excellent work, surely in collaboration with director Bart Layton. I love the way the notably out-of-the-ordinary shots are integral to telling the story. Sometimes you think, “All these little visual tricks look really cool, but are they just showing off?” Then you realize, “No, so many of these memorable images are echoes of earlier films because the characters are getting carried away with their plans and being swept right out of reality. They think they’re in one of those heist movies they watch for research.”
I love that “Google glass” moment. (That’s the way I think of it, though if you haven’t seen the scene, it’s a misleading description.) My daughter and I have been watching every Hitchcock movie we can get our hands on for a summer project. So I’ve just watched The Lodger twice, and our prying look at Warren’s driven Googling reminded me of the family watching the lodger pace across the (glass) ceiling from below. (It’s also a great reminder that the one ones who actually get these telling, revealing looks from Warren are a bunch of screens. The TVs, computers, and phones are like another (silent) partner in the heist. Too bad the guys are all so plugged in and checked out from society in general.)
I like that in its early stages, Spencer and Warren’s plan looks more like a Hitchock thriller, a spy movie, film noir, but then as the plan gains traction, the film starts borrowing shots (and wipes and stuff) from heist movies. At different stages of the action, we get visual changes that work as subtle cues for the audience.
So, in the same way that Warren’s strange choice of Resevoir Dogs for nicknames works as foreshadowing, the film’s actual images also guide us through what is happening and what is about to happen. So much of plotting crime happens in whispers, so to create some dynamic action for the audience to watch on screen, the film gives us visuals that bring with them memories of action in other films. Show, don’t tell, right? American Animals finds truly novel ways to show us what’s happening.
Probably my favorite scene is the moment at the party/in the car when Spencer and Warren first come up with the idea. What an effective way to dramatize the difference in remembered first person accounts (and a clever way to foreshadow the possibility of an unreliable narrator)! It’s also a great way of dramatizing how weirdly together the two are, even if they don’t know what they’re doing. They’re locked inside some kind of shared, warped bubble, impervious to (and untroubled by) reality.
And it looks cool, too.
I was going to stop there, but I just have to mention all the delicious shots inside the grocery store. (Grocery store interiors are so photogenic, but I find I get weird looks if I bring my DSLR in there, so I usually refrain.) Before the heist, the guys walk down the aisle together, and everything surrounding them is colorful and bold and bright and abundant. And then after the crime, Warren revisits the same store alone, and all he can find in there to pique his interest is a single, dingy TV dinner (and the security camera, of course). It’s like the pathetic fallacy illustrated in food packaging (maybe done by Andy Warhol).
Best Scene:
Evan Peters (who was a huge scene stealer as Quicksilver in the Sony X-Men films) is fantastic in every minute he gets on screen and basically dominates the movie…until he encounters Ann Dowd as Betty Jean Gooch.
Dowd is just magnificent in her big moment with Peters. We know his heist is doomed, but it’s a pleasant surprise that (as in the Oceans movies) there is a second heist, the real heist, in the works that we never suspected that the film has had up its sleeves all along.
Dowd steals the scene, and her real life counterpart steals the story.
“I’m not going to hurt you.”
“You are hurting me.”
That’s why I don’t steal.
This moment when reality comes crashing down on the conspirators is almost as emotional for us as it is for them.
(It’s naive of them, too, to believe a librarian in such a sensitive post would just roll over and silently comply. They should know where to look for that key immediately. Clearly there’s a lot they don’t understand about librarians.)
Best Action Sequence:
Warren and Eric’s bumbling tour of the building had me literally on the edge of my seat. As my husband said after the film, “Maybe making the drawings wasn’t such a great idea.”
(Seriously, they’re terrible at heists.)
The Negatives:
I still don’t understand why Eric and Chas agreed to get involved (especially Chas) (and especially Eric)! My husband did point out that Eric had a troubled (but apparently significant) past friendship with Warren that may have been a motivating factor. But still, why isn’t this explored? The movie does not really explain Eric’s motivations. It could. It could tell us more.
As it is, someone planning to join the FBI as soon as possible surely wouldn’t commit such a serious crime just because he got bored in one accounting class. I mean, I guess that is the quickest way to get the FBI’s attention, but…
I find Eric the least compelling character in real life and the one whose motivations make the least sense in the story.
And Chas. Everything he says about ways they can get caught is so dead on. Why did he even join them in the first place?
I realize part of the point of the film is that these guys don’t know why they did it, but Spencer and Warren have this whole weird, intense (potentially latently homoerotic but certainly explicitly codependent) relationship going on. They’re like the girls in Heavenly Creatures. The idea of doing this together has become a whole big thing for them, and they’re both helplessly caught up in their snowballing shared fantasy. At times, it seems like seeing the robbery through is what they have to do to stay together and continue increasing the thrill level of their lives. So the very fact that their behavior makes no sense itself does make sense. They’re well on their way to having some psychological disorder named after them.
But Eric and Chas have no such stakes. Both of them could (and logically should) say, “No thanks!” But instead they both gush, “Yes please!” Why?
There must be a little more than that (than nothing!) to their decisions to join in on a major crime. I think the movie needs to give us a bit more to chew on here.
I also left the theater feeling extremely unsettled about Spencer Reinhard. There’s nothing wrong with the performance of Barry Keoghan (so memorable as the much asked after lad in Dunkirk). But Keoghan’s Spencer has a much different vibe from the real life Reinhard. Of course, the Reinhard in the interviews is older, but it’s not that.
As far as I’m concerned, the exact sorts of questions the real life Spencer uses to undermine Warren can be used by the audience to undermine Spencer himself. If we can’t trust Warren, after all, why on earth should we trust Spencer? I left feeling extremely distrustful of him. Everyone keeps saying that the guys didn’t even know what they wanted, but Spencer knew what he wanted, and he got it, and now he’s doing exactly what he wanted. Maybe Warren did deceive Spencer, but it’s just as likely that Spencer manipulated Warren.
Images tell us so much in this movie, and we are deliberately shown the moment of Spencer on his knees to the guy in the frat house, being forced to chug beer (or whatever) in such a suggestive and subservient way. The idea as we move forward is that Spencer doesn’t want to be demeaned by those jerks. He wants to be dominated by Warren. (Both Spencer and Warren insist that they are equals, that no one is the ringleader, but what we see tells a slightly different story, as again and again Spencer keeps forcing Warren to be in charge, to shield him from danger while meeting his need for excitment.) I’m not suggesting that there’s a sexual relationship between the two. I’m saying that there’s an odd power dynamic at play. At first it reads as Spencer basically begging, “Make me be equals with you,” like he wants to be like Warren but doesn’t know how. But what if what Spencer actually wants is to manipulate Warren? Maybe Warren is lying to Spencer, sure, but isn’t it just as likely that Warren is trying to protect Spencer, and that Spencer is using Warren, perhaps knowingly?
At first this felt like a strike against the film, but with a little distance, I’m seeing it more as a clever move by the film, setting up the final plot twist choose-your-own-adventure style. Is Spencer some kind of small time Keyser Söze, and are we still playing crime film? Or is he just an older, wiser version of a young (every)man who made a tragic mistake? You decide.
I do think that we should get more insights into the motivations of Eric and Chas, though.
Overall: