Film Review: American Animals
One of the strengths of True/False Film Festival is in how it finds films that straddle the line between documentary and fiction. Director Bart Layton’s American Animals doesn’t straddle the line so much as it destroys it, telling its story in a way only films can.
Animals is the story of the Transylvania Book Heist, a daring 2004 attempt by four college students to steal rare first editions of Audubon’s Birds of America and Darwin’s On the Origin of Species from a university library. Layton includes interviews with the four robbers, but most of the film consists of reenactments.
The students (played by Barry Keoghan, Evan Peters, Jared Abrahamson and Blake Jenner) are immediately set up as unreliable narrators. As each tells his side of the story, they add and subtract details both subtle and obvious. One tells of a Hispanic individual with a ponytail, while another claims the same individual was Caucasian with short hair.
Layton leans into these inconsistencies, visually changing these details in real time. He goes so far as to call one of the major events of the film into question. It’s a question only one of the real life subjects can answer and he isn’t telling.
The real subjects appear within the reenactments as well. They function as a kind of self-referential cameo by way of Greek chorus, providing commentary and warnings to their younger selves. One gets the sense that seven years on the heist is one of their greatest regrets.
The sense of regret filters down into the tiny details of the film. The actors reference Reservoir Dogs multiple times within the film, only for one of the real life subjects to cut in claiming it’s his least favorite Tarantino film.
It’s that attention to detail that makes this film so good. Layton imbues the film with so many heist film tropes that it’s almost like Reservoir Dogs or Ocean’s 11, except instead of criminal masterminds the protagonists are bumbling college kids. American Animals is one of the best films of the year and it is well worth the time and money.
