Nosh 114: 'American Animals,' 'Mountain' & More

By David Elliott

     

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, fresh each Friday.

APPETIZER: Reviews of American Animals and Mountain.

American Animals

To ricochet in one week from the feminist caper romp  Ocean’s 8 to the more reality-bound but also surreal American Animals confirms that the heist formula can still loot our attention. Bart Layton proves himself a daringly crafty writer and director. Instead of eight snappy chicks he has what might be called the Four Stooges. No Metropolitan Museum of Art lures their heist. Their daring debut target is precious rare books at the Transylvania University Library in Lexington (not Romania, but Kentucky). Foremost is a first edition of Audubon’s Birds of America, so massive it almost requires a crane (not the bird).

This bizarre robbery actually happened, in 2004. Layton sticks to known and surmised facts with a double-track scheme. Actors play the college-age crime crew, but the real-life crooks also appear, inserting docu-bits of retrospective gravity (one, Warren Lipka, is more charismatic than the good actor who plays him, Evan Peters). Warren, a hot rod of giddy machismo, prods the fretful young artist Spencer (Barry Keoghan), preening Chas the driver (Blake Jenner), and brainy, sullen Eric (Jared Abrahamson). Studying famous heist films, they remain both procedurally clever and amateurishly wishful. A clip from The Killing (Kubrick, 1955) appears like the Ghost of Screw-ups Past.

Ole B. Birkeland’s photography vividly canvases Lexington, my birth town (Warren calls the bluegrass burg “a disappointment,” which I don’t take personally, having lived there only one infantile year). The suspense is special, like a school project to make male hormones from LSD and Gatorade. Most heist films use buddy bonding as generic dude spackle for the plot, but these four are truly testing their friendships. No Rat Pack will emerge from their criminality, which includes absurd old-man beards and wigs. There is a bow to Reservoir Dogs, and a Rashomon update at the finale, yet the intimate rooting is real characters. One is the smug, then terrified librarian, Mrs. Gooch (ace talent Ann Dowd).

This must be the most personal of heist pictures, its layered charm caught in Warren’s schizzy line as he tries to subdue Mrs. Gooch: “Shut the fuck up! I’m sorry, OK?” The heist, which could be a new formula in chaos theory, is beyond description. There are flavors of the Coen Bros., and Bottle Rocket, and England’s immortally crooked comedy The Ladykillers. These are very human animals.

Mountain

“What are men to rocks and mountains?,” ponders young Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. Nothing, answers Mountain. You don’t need to know Jane Austen’s novel to recognize the vast gap between us and the epic rock piles. Jennifer Peedom’s documentary spans that void on a rope of wonder and death-defiance. It joins the loftiest mountain films (see list below). Peedom also did Sherpa, about the fabled native guides and portagers exploited by the “Everest industry” (the Sherpas don’t thrill to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Climb Ev’ry Mountain”).

The titanic peaks (also the Grand Canyon, glaciers, ice caves) induce a certain awe, reinforced by Willem Dafoe’s gravely thoughtful narration. And the high-climbing music (Beethoven, Vivaldi, Part, Grieg, but not Wagner – Werner Herzog must own all Wagner rights above 5,000 feet). There are riffs on daredevil hubris, the explosive ski biz, the summit-climb cult that now rivals the Klondike mob in Chaplin’s The Gold Rush. Even if you have never ski-surfed powder snow, or heard the crack of a calving avalanche, you feel in Mountain the primal disparity between humans and glorious crags, and the elevated elation that risks the vertigo of madness.

SALAD: A List

Outstanding Mountain Movies:

The Gold Rush (Chaplin, 1925), The Holy Mountain (Fanck, 1926), The Blue Light (Riefenstahl, 1932), Lost Horizon (Capra, 1937), High Sierra (Walsh, 1941), Treasure of the Sierra Madre (Huston, 1948), The Far Country (Mann, 1954), Scream of Stone (Herzog, 1991), Alive (Marshall, 1993), Kundun (Scorsese, 1997), Touching the Void (Macdonald, 2003), To the Limit (Danquart, 2007) and Sherpa (Peedom, 2015).  

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

David O. Selznick, producing his florid postwar Western Duel in the Sun (starring Jennifer Jones, Joe Cotten and Gregory Peck), “opted to add a narrative that might cast the film’s trashy story as some kind of prairie legend. So Orson Welles was hired – he hoped for a fat check – (and) Selznick apparently never detected Welles’s elephant-like parody of the work: ‘Deep among the lonely, sun-baked hills of Texas, the great and weather-beaten stone still stands that the Comanches call Squaw’s Head Rock. Time cannot change its impassive face, nor dim the legend of the wild young lovers ….’ (alas, instead of money Orson got) a pair of antique dueling pistols. In respectful satire, Welles gave the mogul every subsequent Christmas two glass pistols filled with candy.” (Quote from David Thomson’s Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles).

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Timothy “Speed” Levitch “belongs to Manhattan’s tribe of singular soloists, marginal prophets, unabashed contrarians, yet is no simple eccentric like ‘Miss Delphine Binger who assiduously attends to her collection of several hundred thousand goose, turkey and chicken wishbones, boiled and polished, decorated with charms or ribbons, which she likes to send to well-known people’ (thank you, Jan Morris).” Speed, the utterly unique NYC tour guide of The Cruise, later moved to KCM: Kansas City, Mo. (Quote from the Tim Levitch/The Cruise chapter of my 2016 book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

A great movie image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.

A pinto horse out-hams Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones in Duel in the Sun (Selznick, 1946; director King Vidor, cinematographers Lee Garmes, Hal Rosson.)

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