A day at the Sarasota Film Festival: American Animals

The 20th anniversary of the Sarasota Film Festival (April 13-22) offers 90 features, 131 shorts, and numerous film-related events — conversations, block parties, forums, workshops, lectures, showcases — throughout its 10-day run. If you’re looking for cinematic saturation, you can find it here. On any given day, there may be as many as 20 different offerings, so you'll have to make some serious choices. As each film has been juried by the selection committee, you can be sure of screen-worthy offerings — premieres, feature films, shorts, documentaries, foreign-language, and more. 

Seeing back-to-back-to-back films is what it’s all about, and here's where critic Ben Wiley started. 

American Animals (R, Directed by Bart Layton, Comedy-Drama, starring Evan Peters, Barry Keoghan, Blake Jenner, Jared Abrahamson, Ann Dowd, Udo Kier) 

It’s a heist film, and all about four disaffected, white college boys out for a bit of excitement that soon lands them each in federal prison for seven years. So much for their bullshit sessions about an existential search for excitement and grasping it when you can. While watching a number of heist films, they hatch an amateur plan to steal priceless, antiquarian books (Darwin’s Origin of Species and Audubon’s Birds of America, for starters) from the college library’s special collections. What seemed so reasonable in the apartment falls apart in disarray in execution. The gap between their youthful imagination with bungled planning and the reality of coordinating a sophisticated burglary totally eludes their American can-do spirit. 

“This is not based on a true story” — so reads the opening title card, till the words “not based on” are whisked away. Indeed, this is a true event from 2004 at Transylvania University in Lexington, KY, so you know director Layton is going to provide a whip-smart, smart-ass take on this collegiate gang that couldn’t shoot straight. A less-than-effective maneuver is to break into the special collection in broad daylight, but costumed as geezers. One of the lads suggests this is a perfect disguise as “Being old is the closest fucking thing to being invisible." So it goes.

In a powerful blend of the narrative with the documentary, we see the heist as it plays out in all its humiliating defeat, then the director inserts sequences where the real person, now adult and somewhat enlightened, ruefully reflects on his youthful foolishness and misguided ambition. Would that we all could experience just such exchange of our older, wiser selves with our younger, stupider selves. It’s a brilliant piece of editing to tie these shots together of young and old where the older man hands off a cigarette in one frame to the actor playing his younger self in another frame. The film is filled with those cinematic sleights-of-hand, and it does really elevate this movie to more than a get-rich-scheme.

And the director spends some time trying to answer the important question as to why these four college boys — smart, artistic, athletic, albeit coddled, entitled, privileged — were so susceptible to the notion of finding adventure through breaking the law. Ultimately, there is no answer. Even the real-life librarian, Betty Jean Gooch, observes, “They did not want to work to achieve a transformative experience." Indeed they did not, and are likely not the last four college students whose fantasy ambitions will overwhelm common sense.

Slow to take off at first, it quickly engages you and you are soon sucked into their fantasy that is doomed from the very first bright idea. Watching their inevitable failure is painful, but it’s beautiful cinema, saturated in irony, rich with bird and animal imagery, filled with compelling performances, and then that brilliant trick of the older self looking in disbelief at his younger incarnation.

My heart and mind have returned again and again to feeling and thinking this movie. If there’s ever a film worthy of breaking free from the festival circuit for its own mainstream release, this one should.

This article appears in Apr 19-26, 2018.