By Christine Westwood
The opening sequence of Bart Layton’s American Animals cuts images of exotic bird paintings with closeups of young men’s faces as they assume disguises to perform a heist. It is ritual, comedy and suspense all in one. We are taken through the looking glass into the hybrid fictional / documentary story of a bungled crime committed by four college boys when they tried to steal rare books from their Kentucky college library.
Bart Layton is equally skilled at short and long form and episodic, including TV series like Banged up Abroad and Paranormal Witness but it was The Imposter (2012), a documentary about a teenager who claims to a grieving Texas family that he is their missing son, that took the film festivals by force and scored a BAFTA and an Oscar nomination.
The Imposter is documentary with elements of fictional storytelling while American Animals pushes the tension between forms even further in this fictional story with documentary elements.
Describing his creative process to FilmInk ahead of the premier screening at Sydney Film Festival, Layton says, “I write a lot of drafts of the script, then when I’m close to physical prep I storyboard. I don’t necessarily show anyone the storyboards, but I get the whole movie composed in my head. This is unconventional scripting because it’s got a lot of documentary in it as well.”
The producer / director also shared what he feels is the secret to success.
“Me and my partner, [producer] Dimitri Doganis founded our own production company RAW and the vision has always been to tell the stories you’re passionate about. Finance tends to follow the quality of the work, so tell the stories that you are drawn to and what you feel passionately connected to and everything else will follow. We started RAW 13 years ago and it’s still going strong.”
Layton was attracted to American Animals because of the social question behind it. Why would four privileged college boys risk everything to attempt an amateur and ill-fated heist? Layton puts it down to a horror of being average, something he believes is symptomatic of our Facebook, self-regarding culture where being an OK success is not enough, one has to make a mark in the world regardless of the means.
The irony for these four would-be criminals is that the plan that was supposed to free them from ordinariness becomes real life incarceration, seven years apiece. The film narrative is commented on in interviews with the real-life characters. They were freed five years ago, their lives all curiously marked by their criminal experience. Artist Spencer paints birds, the subject of the rare book they tried to steal. Chas is a fitness trainer specialising in prison. Their reflections on their younger, selfish and stupid selves, presents the viewer with a swag of considerations. The inconsistencies of memory is also an intriguing factor in the story, adding another tweak to the tension between fact and fiction.
With such a strong premise, casting the four young actors was crucial. Barry Keoghan (Killing of a Sacred Deer, Dunkirk) is Spencer Reinhold, a talented art student from a loving family, the boy least likely to turn to crime.
“The idea is that Barry’s character is our proxy into the world,” Layton explains, “but each of the four have different motivations and characters so audiences will connect to them all in different ways.
“Barry is just a mesmerising actor to watch. He’s so natural and completely authentic. I really didn’t want actors that felt like Hollywood pretty boys. I wanted people that felt real and Barry’s got that in spades. There’s a lot going on behind the eyes, he’s rare.”
Spencer’s main partner in crime, before they bring two others into their scheme, is Warren, played by Evan Peters (X-Men) as a charismatic loose cannon. When Spencer mentions the valuable art books in the college library, Warren takes the idea of stealing them and runs with it.
‘What else are you going to do with your boring life?’ is his refrain that keeps a sometimes reluctant Spencer on board. Warren may be the catalyst, but all the boys are prey to the same dumb thinking. Why work hard and take the long road when you can trick and steal your way to notoriety and instant wealth? And it’s been done a ton of times in glamourous heist movies, so how hard can it be?
A shambles, as it turns out, but in the process Layton depicts the crime in outrageously comic and slapstick detail, with plenty of tongue in cheek references to classic heist films and laugh out loud moments for the audience. The poster shows one such scene, the boys in ridiculous ‘old men’ disguises as they conspicuously scope the proposed crime scene.
There were plenty of comments like ‘brilliant’ and ‘groundbreaking’ after the screening. Layton certainly demonstrates an extraordinary facility to juggle interconnecting threads of narrative, commentary and re-enactment. Self-referential tropes from popular culture add humour and texture while crisp, detailed editing keeps you hooked in the action and skilful direction of the four young actors allows their energy to fuel the ride.
American Animals is fun and entertaining but never loses sight of the question at the heart of the documentary investigation that underpins the story. What forces, personal and social, were at play that fostered such an outrageous, doomed endeavour?
See for yourself when American Animals plays the Melbourne International Film Festival, August 2 – 19, 2018
