American Animals is at its core a film for lovers of storytelling. Its small scope, small stakes are appropriate for the football school, blue-collar America it depicts. Transylvania U, Kentucky. No planet in peril, no damsels in distress. A dissection in miniature of generation Y’s quarter life crisis in the early 2000s: “This town is a disappointment, this school is a disappointment, you are a disappointment.”
Gushing aside, American Animals is a pretty odd financial concept. Moviepass is essentially paying its subscribers to watch a movie that it purchased for distribution. “As if they weren’t burning enough money buying our tickets,” Wife says. I think we thought this movie had slipped through our fingers because of its limited release schedule. The only way we could have seen it together in California would have been to drive up to Walnut Creek in the two day window between trips to Spain and Hawaii. Its sudden release at Dole Cannery seemed like a sign. We’ll do spoilers below.
Story about Storytelling. I was tricked a little by the format in a way that I think might be understandable if you go in with no prior info on this one. The movie is organized as a dramatized documentary with regular interjections from the people in the flesh. The oral history format is so fluid and playful that I almost immediately fit it into my head as comparable to the likes of I, Tonya (2017) or the Big Short (2015) that I just assumed that the people giving testimony were as much actors as the twenty-somethings portraying their story. In which case, the storytelling assumes some complex secondhand and third-hand narration. Not so, necessarily. The testimonials are from the actual people that the movie’s about, which means all those scenes where I thought that grown men were pretending at growing emotional, rendered speechless at times when confronted by their actions, was actually not acting at all. In a way that makes the performances by the younger cohort all the more charged, since so much of what they’re doing is filling in the emotive gaps of the interviews.
Aside from the interplay between the fictive and real in the film, American Animals is immersed in metatheatrical allusion, giving it a splash of realism, playfulness, and pulp that most other heist films lack. The pop cultural amnesia of most other heist films didn’t feel like a major failing until I saw this movie, which I think is a sign of a treasure. (Most of this reading of the film is me trying to decode what my older brother and sister-in-law like about it so much.) The Ocean’s 11 choreography with “A Little Less Conversation” thrumming in the background during the dream sequence sets the tone for the care with which the cinematographer tries to emulate other great heist films.
The script’s references to the cinematic canon (the sprawling stack of heist DVDs from Blockbuster) gives the movie a sense of self-awareness that does double work as a driver of plot (“what would actually happen in real life if we did this?”) and expectation setter for outcomes. Even the cheeky two-way mirror effect on Warren’s Google search (“I Feel Lucky” button safely intact) feels like a nicely planned bit of nostalgic comedy without falling into the lazy tropes of internet searching or tech-heavy, low-budget, product placement boondoggles (Unfriended 2015, Friend Request 2016, or John Cho’s upcoming “computer thriller” Searching 2018). As if to say, you will see Google in this movie, but not the romanticized, paid-for version of it. We will only show you its diminished, naked self from years past. It’s a move that might be called “irreverent,” but might just as much be “reverent” to the eccentricities of the past, both in film and pop culture.
The scene discussing Quentin Tarantino’s Resevoir Dogs is an example of the depth of the film, the more one brings to it, the more they are rewarded for their familiarity with the genre. Scene breaks are almost by definition pretentious, but they signal audacity and ambition in terms of structural format, and in American Animals, they do a few fun things with them, what Wife referred to as “fake outs”. The title cards, “The Day Before the Robbery” and “The Day of the Robbery,” build expectations about the progression of plot, and their re-use adds an element of comedy.
There are some lovely companion/mirror scenes that create symmetry in the plot, the best example of which are the three instances of heists: the meat locker, the library, and the grocery store. Each sets an expectation for the following event and colors the emotional topography of the scene. The music is mostly diegetic (a favorite storytelling technique of my older brother).
Realism and Violence. One of the many things that distinguishes this film from other heist films is its interest in realism both in dialogue and violence. It’s almost a little too snobby to bring up Akira Kurosawa in any discussion but this is a safe space, so I’ll just liken some of the fighting and violence to Kurosawa’s techniques in Rashomon, or Stray Dog, or Drunken Angel, where violence is very intentionally unchoreographed, made to look rougher and more ugly on purpose. On the spectrum of realism, American Animals hews very close to that end. The only other kinds of films I could think of that I’d seen (I welcome comments) that are doing similar sorts of things with an objective, detailed depiction of violence are cowboy movies like Hostiles (2017) or the reboot of 3:10 to Yuma (2007), possibly even Hell or High Water. On the other end of the spectrum are films that make fighting look easy and cool and beautiful like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the Matrix movies, even a film like Upgrade plays with the tropes of choreographed violence.
Withholding of librarian’s testimonial until the end of the movie, increased the tension and suspense, makes us wonder with dread what they did to her. When she finally gets to speak she can call our beloved antiheroes on their privilege and small-mindedness, put their actions into perspective and challenge the audience’s special connection with them.
American Animal’s aesthetic does for Kentucky what No Lovers Left Alive (2013) does for Detroit and Hell or High Water (2016) for the American Southwest. It’s a rollicking heist film with a lot of self-awareness about its aspirations and its failings. If you like movies you’ll love this one.
2 Comments