American Animals
This film is not based on a true story. This film is a true story.
We join grad students Warren, in the form of Evan Peters (American Horror Story), and Spencer, Barry Keoghan (The Killing of a Sacred Deer), who, restless in their ordinary lives, decide to steal a priceless book collection from the Transylvania University library to give their lives meaning.
American Animals is grounded in fantasy and delusion yet remains the most realistic heist film ever made. This is the Thomas Crown Affair as masterminded by stoner arts students raised on a diet of bullshit Hollywood prophesies that the underdog will always become top dog, and everyone can succeed if they just believe. Not so, it turns out. The film is a critique of America’s obsession with individuality and the dangers of growing up in a culture where the only options available to you are sucking a beer bong through some guy’s flies at a frat party or becoming the next Al Capone.
Bart Layton’s masterpiece unravels like a pass-the-parcel of misdirection, misinformation, red herrings and pink flamingos. All is not as it appears and the more you squint at the whole picture, the grainier and more out of focus it becomes. Holding on to the truth throughout is like trying to cup a quart of syrup in your hands for two hours and not letting a single drop through.
It’s hard to imagine how a story about a badly planned crime could have been planned any better. At every narrative corner, American Animals bucks your expectations and plays deliciously and sadistically with what you as a cinema audience have been taught to expect from this kind of film, dolling out cold portions of truth with a helping of congealed nihilism on the side. Every time you sink into the self-deception and wish-fulfilment of these moronic fantasists, you are repeatedly slapped about the face with the scarring effects of consequence. Their fuck ups are your fuck ups, their disappointed parents are your disappointed parents, their furious scholarship dean is ... well, okay, I guess not every part of their lives are totally relatable.
You can tell straight out that Layton was spawned from a family of artists – the opening credits feature upside-down shots of Lexington suburbia interspaced with our idiotic misfits donning grey moustaches and driving gloves and close ups of Audubon's The Birds of America tearing into each other viciously. Beyond his almost pornographic art-fixation, Layton’s feature is a faux-documentary that makes all others of its ilk look like first-year media student projects. It’s a mockumentary that still manages to eclipse some of the best genuine docs out there, treading water somewhere between Bowling for Columbine and This Is Spinal Tap.
This is the most intelligent and visceral film about morons ever made: it is Pineapple Express for fans of Jane Campion; it is The Usual Suspects as re-envisioned by Charlie Kaufman; it is pure, shrewd, visionary madness. American Animals varies so wildly from other heist films that it almost feels like an insult to compare it to cult favourites like Heat, Rififi and The Inside Man. Frankly, it needs its own category or genre – the ‘Postmodern Heist’ or maybe the ‘Post-Heist Modern’ or even ‘Neo-Heist’ or perhaps the ‘Docuheist’ or the ‘Heicumentary’ or maybe just something a little better and snappier. This is the greatest film about the 21st Century American Dream to have graced our cinemas, taking one of the most grappled-with ideas in US culture and dismantling it as effortlessly as if it were an Ikea flat-pack.
American Animals is one of the darkest jokes ever told. It is a breath of fresh air. It is something brave and horrific and brilliant. It refuses to explain itself and is all the better for that.
This is not a real review.
9/10
