Bart Layton (2018)
In The Imposter (2012), Bart Layton inserted bits of dramatised reconstruction to pad out an intriguing but thin talking-heads documentary. In American Animals, his first dramatic feature, Layton interrupts the narrative with interviews with the actual participants in the real-life events on which the film is based. This serves a dual purpose. First, it’s a means of explaining the motivation of the four students who planned and, in December 2004, carried out an extraordinary robbery at Transylvania University, a liberal arts college in Lexington, Kentucky. Second, Layton uses the real thieves’ differing recollections of events as a demonstration of the fallibility of memory – to fancify his heist movie and give it a whimsically post-modern feel. Spencer Reinhard recalls first suggesting the idea of the robbery to Warren Lipka while they were smoking weed at a party. Lipka thinks it was while they were smoking weed in a car. Layton accompanies their testimony with film of Spencer (Barry Keoghan) and Warren (Evan Peters) chatting at a party, then in a car … Reinhard remembers a potential fence as a scuzzy, thirty-something, pony-tailed man, wearing a blue scarf – or was it purple? The scarf colour changes before our eyes – then the whole man: Lipka recollects that he was well dressed and quite elderly.
Layton begins with a Charles Darwin quote: ‘We must suppose that American animals migrated from the outer world to the deeper and deeper recesses of the Kentucky caves’. The quote and opening titles appear against bird illustrations by John James Audubon and other paintings of animal life. These words and pictures are directly relevant to the plot. Spencer, Warren and the other members of this gang of four, Erik Borsuk (Jared Abrahamson) and Chas Allen II (Blake Jenner), mean to steal from the special collections room of the Transylvania library – and then sell – prized items that include double-sized folios of Audubon’s The Birds of America and a first edition of On the Origin of Species. Darwin’s words, as well as supplying Layton’s title, also indicate the writer-director’s perspective on his protagonists[1]. All four young men are from white middle-class backgrounds; none had any previous police convictions. Reinhard, an art student at Transylvania, says he felt the need to make something exciting, even terrible, happen in his life in order to give it meaning and to be a true artist. Lipka, on a full athletic scholarship at the University of Kentucky, talks about finding ‘ways to upend your status quo’. Bart Layton (who is British) suggests that the robbers are representative of a nationally specific form of life. This is a bit of a stretch: it’s hard to believe that relatively privileged youngsters in other developed nations have never acted on similar desires and temptations.
American Animals shows the students as increasingly out of their depth. Warren travels to Amsterdam for a nervous meeting with potential buyers (Udo Kier and Fedor Steer) of the books and manuscripts the boys intend to steal. Spencer gets cold feet before the day of the heist, for which the foursome disguise themselves as old men, to ridiculous effect. Things go wrong enough at the library to prevent their going through with the robbery. Reinhard recalls the sense of deliverance he felt at this; in the event, it’s only a short reprieve as Warren is determined to have another go. He gets his way. Once he and Eric are inside the special collections room (Spencer and Chas are both outside, as lookout and getaway driver respectively), they prove to be very amateurish criminals. The cheap stun gun they use to zap the librarian Betty Jean Gooch (Ann Dowd) doesn’t work properly: she has to be forcibly restrained and Warren keeps apologising to her. They struggle to find the key to the display cases. The books are much heavier than they expected. The thieves and their booty get in a lift that takes them to a basement from which there’s no exit. They end up dropping the Audubon books in a stairwell, rush out of the building’s front entrance and make it to Chas’s car far from unobserved.
In spite of this comedy of errors, they don’t leave the library building empty-handed (and, puzzlingly, no one seems to identify them to the police, even though they’d dispensed with the geriatric make-up for this second attempt). Warren, before departing the scene of the crime, has shoved into his backpack a first edition of Darwin, a two-volume set of the horticultural classic Hortus Sanitatis and some original Audubon pencil drawings. Spencer and Warren make an appointment with Christie’s in New York to get an authentication of the value of their haul (actually around $750,000 in total), which their Dutch buyers require. Layton, through illustrations of the quartet’s variously erratic behaviour in the weeks following the theft, stresses their persisting guilty conscience. An FBI investigation traces back to them an email address used both to make their viewing appointment at the library and to set up the Christie’s meeting. Arrested in dawn raids, they plead guilty as charged. All four are sentenced to seven years in prison. They’ve now served their time and legends at the end of American Animals summarise what they’re doing now. Allen is a fitness coach and Borsuk a writer; both are based in California. Lipka has returned to college, in Philadelphia, to study film-making. Reinhard still lives in Lexington and works as an artist. His speciality is pictures of birds.
American Animals is entertaining but disagreeably tricksy and pretentious: its combination of heist-that-goes-wrong dramedy and cautionary tale is reinforced by Anne Nikitin’s throbbing, strong-arming score, which insists how suspenseful the story is, and that it’s morally serious business too. Barry Keoghan, Evan Peters, Jared Abrahamson and Blake Jenner are all fine but Bart Layton, by making them share the screen with the actual people involved, reduces his actors to figures in an extended reconstruction. The audience naturally assumes it’s getting the truth of what happened from the real ex-cons and Layton does little to unsettle that assumption. Keoghan and Peters partly overcome this built-in handicap, though by somewhat fortuitous means: Keoghan because he’s so extraordinary looking, compared with Reinhard; Peters because the character he creates is more likeable than Lipka. It’s as well the latter is now learning how to make films rather than appear in them because he comes across as a camera-conscious bad actor – so much so that you almost wonder if his recollections at variance with Reinhard’s are scripted inventions. Now that really would give a post-modern twist to American Animals.
Layton’s talking heads also include the boys’ parents, some of them upset and appalled to this day by their sons’ misdeeds, and Betty Jean Gooch. She still works as a special collections librarian at Transylvania University and is still understandably angry about what happened to her there in 2004. The real Gooch’s appearances in the film are relatively few, which may have helped Ann Dowd to create an independent personality – competent, affable and, until the robbery, pretty pleased with herself – to an extent the others can’t. Dowd’s talent helped too: she’s an outstanding character actress.
Postscript
It says something for American Animals that the film was involving enough not to be upstaged by the build-up to it, at this special BFI preview for Champion members and invited guests of Audi. I don’t remember reading about the setting up of the BFI-Audi partnership but, for a year or so now, nearly every screening has been preceded by a Vorsprung durch Technik advert, most of them terribly overlong (the ‘Send in the Clowns’ one a particular offender). Tickets for the screening indicated ‘Audi Q8: A Big Entrance’, with no mention of the film’s name. There were oversized white boxes placed on seats in NFT1, containing ‘goodies’ and a ‘Welcome’ message from Benjamin Braun (Marketing Director, Audi UK): ‘A trip to the cinema wouldn’t be the same without popcorn and sweets. Here are a few treats from us’. The days when you got told off in BFI for trying to put a cough lozenge in your mouth seemed more distant than ever.
As the lights went down, a small orchestra took to the stage. Up on the screen behind them came the commercial for the new Audi Q8, featuring … an orchestra and choir performing the ‘Dies Irae’ from Verdi’s Requiem. The live orchestra in NFT1 might as well have been miming, their playing drowned out by the volume on the advert soundtrack. A live choir then sprang up in various parts of the auditorium – I could just about hear them because some were in the row immediately behind me. After this pompous, fatuous extravagance, Benjamin Braun took to the stage to introduce American Animals and gave the strong impression of knowing as much about films as I do about Audis. He concluded by saying, ‘I’m too young to be humble so I’ll take your applause now’. I was too old to put my hands together. And, to be honest, waggish Benjamin wasn’t young enough for his carefully constructed casual outfit – white shirt and trainers, close-fitting waistcoat and faded jeans. Middle-age spread took the eye between where the waistcoat ended and the jeans began.
2 September 2018
[1] To avoid repeatedly specifying whether references are to (a) the real people or (b) their counterparts in the dramatisation, I’ll henceforth use surnames for (a) and forenames for (b).