plug: American Animals (2018)
"The idea that we were doing this extraordinary thing absolutely appealed to us. Appealed to me."
It’s always a welcome trip to stumble upon a movie with little to no expectations either way, then find yourself absolutely floored by it. That’s my relationship with American Animals, an already kind-of forgotten docudrama about a real library heist that took place at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky in 2004. Director Bart Layton takes a half-documentary/half-reenactment approach, interviewing the four former students who attempted the heist as the story unfolds on screen. This isn’t the first scripted docudrama to include interviews with real-life counterparts as a storytelling device, but there’s a very specific emphasis on it in this film that makes the whole thing feel very original. It’s a uniquely devastating viewing experience that I haven’t been able to shake.
The central figures of American Animals are Spencer Reinhard (Barry Keoghan) and Warren Lipka (Evan Peters), a pair of college students with just enough privilege and boredom in their lives to move them toward catastrophe. Spencer is an art student hung up on the notion that an artist needs to have lived through something extreme or even tragic to make great art. Warren is a drifting rebel, at school on a football scholarship he doesn’t want, desperate to funnel is energy into something “extraordinary.” After Spencer tells Warren about his recent tour of the university’s rare books collection, Warren’s overwhelming enthusiasm and charisma takes over and the pair start planning a heist with two other students, Eric Borsuk (Jared Abrahamson) and Chas Allen (Blake Jenner). In the platinum age of Netflix true crime docs, American Animals is an inventive remix of documentaries and docudramas — tweaking the size and shape of both to tell a slow-burn true horror story about the tragic limits of American individualism.
It’s also an effective subversion of American heist movies. There’s a lot of emphasis, both in the interviews and reenactments, on how these guys took direct inspiration from shit like Reservoir Dogs, Ocean’s Eleven, and a bunch of other heist movies to plan out their absurd operation. Throughout the film, Warren’s recurring refrain is along the lines of “C’mon guys, don’t you want to see what happens if we actually do this??” There’s plenty of levity (as well as abject terror) in the lead-up to the robbery, but once you see how quickly things go wrong, it all gets real heavy real fast.
As the real Spencer Reinhard says in the film, "to have this need to know what is on the other side of that line, and realizing the only way to actually do that is to cross it, there's never a point in your life after that where you haven't already crossed that line. It was definitely a terrifying thing." American Animals is a rare heist movie where the consequences of the heist stick with you as much as the heist itself. It's a wickedly entertaining anomaly of the true-crime boom, andit's heartbreaking as hell.