Ģ��Av

When Bart Layton was deciding which of John James Ģ��Av’s paintings to showcase in his new film , about the half-baked, real-life 2004 heist by four college sophomores in Kentucky trying to steal an original four-volume folio of Birds of America, he knew some people in his audience might not be well-versed in the history of ornithological illustration. So, the British director went with the one he considered “iconic”: the American Flamingo. “People who are not familiar with Ģ��Av will see that and say, ‘Oh, right, it's that guy,’ ” Layton explains.

Throughout the first half of the film, the poised flamingo, one of the 435 bird species that make up Birds of America, plays a starring role. It’s the image we see when quiet art student Spencer Reinhard (played by Barry Keoghan) first sets eyes on the glass-encased tome during a freshman-orientation tour of Transylvania University’s rare books room, while the librarian (Ann Dowd) explains that the volumes are worth millions. As he, his childhood friend Warren Lipka (Evan Peters), and two other friends sketch out how they’ll gain access to the collections room and snatch the books in broad daylight, the flamingo painting resurfaces in their hyper-idealized fantasy. And when a reluctant Reinhard is on the verge of backing out, the night before the crime is set to go down, it’s an eerie vision of a ghost-like flamingo standing in a suburban street that gets him back in the game.

But in the scene in which the would-be robbers finally arrive at the library, the book is open not to the flamingo, but to Ģ��Av’s illustration of a pair of Peregrine Falcons tearing a duck apart. It’s a violent image to anchor how the zany caper—the foursome even gave each other color-coded names, Reservoir Dogs-style—was in reality a brutal act: The scheme hinged on Lipka tasering and tying up the librarian in charge of the collection. “That’s [the moment when] decent, supposedly well-educated young men become animals,” Layton says.