Jason J Hedrick
Darren Aronofsky evidently needed to make a film like Caught Stealing. For those who have been paying even peripheral attention to his output since his indie debut Pi in the late 90’s, the act of releasing a sexy, violent, screwball crime picture is a drastic tonal shift compared to almost everything else in his filmography. In fact, compared to everything in his filmography. I imagine a lot of moviegoers had the same experience I had when seeing the trailer recently, perhaps scratching their heads at the sight of Aronofsky’s name appearing at the end of a rather bouncy, romantic, crime-caper-y montage. For this seeming creative shift of gears alone, Caught Stealing quickly became a curiosity. And, while the result does feel like the movie he needed to make, the question of whether something successful is born out of necessity remains.
Based on a book by TV scribe Charlie Huston, Caught Stealing is an unabashed homage to New York in the late ’90s and New York movies more specifically, featuring a particularly heavy-handed obsession with Martin Scorsese’s After Hours (a film I’ve never much cared for, but seems to have experienced a renaissance in recent years). Aronofsky also found inspiration for his new film in New York-centric pictures like Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild, Joseph Sargent’s The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, and William Friedkin’s The French Connection. And, indeed, if you have those references handy and can imagine a crossroads at which they all collide, then you might be able to imagine something like the overall character of Caught Stealing. In its best moments, it has the frantic and comedic abandon of films like After Hours and Something Wild, as well as the pacy and gritty qualities of Pelham and French Connection. In fact, it’s not difficult to imagine Caught Stealing existing in an extended Scorsese-verse, especially since the film features the lead of After Hours, Griffin Dunne (with the same name, no less—“Paul”), and Zoë Kravitz as a paramedic who might as well just gotten off a shift working alongside Nicolas Cage and Ving Rhames in Bringing Out the Dead.
And yet, while Caught Stealing has all those inspirations well in hand, it rarely feels like a film that comes anywhere close to the indelible, repeatable qualities of the best of those films. It feels more like a throwback to films that managed to gain a following via forced repetition common to the early HBO cable model, where certain movies were simply cheap to own, so shown ad nauseum.
As rooted in New York as it is, the central character of Caught Stealing is pure California—a sort of fish-out-of-water, and a former high-school baseball star with the all-American moniker of Hank Thompson, played with steady conviction by Austin Butler. The character arc of Hank, and his relationship to girlfriend Yvonne (Kravitz), is the primary throughline of the movie, and screenwriter Huston hangs a couple of genuinely surprising twists on those throughlines, to be sure. But, while Butler has convincing chops as an increasingly hapless and tormented leading man, whether you care about an alcoholic wannabee baseball star who gets accidentally embroiled in a cartoonish criminal underworld when he begrudgingly agrees to watch the flat of his punk neighbor (Matt Smith) and his cat Bud (rising feline star Tonic) is not a guarantee. Ultimately, Huston designs the character of Hank (possibly a reference to either country star or ball player Hank Thompson, or both) along a series of transformations—California to New York, drunk to sober, egotistical to selfless, dog to cat person, and, in a way, from regretful, self-centered jock to a sort of “new day rising” punk, with the film replacing the driving beat of Hüsker Dü that lingered into the ’90s with the equally propulsive soundtrack of their descendants, Idles.
Caught Stealing has a lot of compelling ingredients, not least of which is a great soundtrack. One notable moment even applies one of my favorite Magnetic Fields tracks, “The Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side.” It’s an oddly bouncy track for a film as fraught with violence as Caught Stealing, which carries the sharp tonal shifts even further by including a brief, animated version of Bud the Cat during the closing credits. All of this to say, the risks the film takes with severe modulations of genre are one of its most compelling features. It manages to be part rom-com, part trauma-drama, part action-caper, and part hyper-violent crime-picture all at once. Aronofsky is clearly going for those surprising and passé shifts in tone, evoking completely out-of-style films of the 1970’s like Little Murders or Freebie and the Bean.
And, for all it attempts, I wish I could say Caught Stealing worked better as a whole. Some of the comedy in the first half lands, though with increasingly fewer hits as the runtime winds out. The casting of Vincent D’Onofrio and Liev Schreiber as the Hassidic “scary monsters” of the film is a fun diversion, as is the inclusion of Carol Kane as their “bubbie,” but the film ultimately feels overstuffed with stunt casting, from Bad Bunny to Action Bronson to the pointless use of the great Laura Dern.
All of this is emblematic of why Caught Stealing is ultimately the epitome of a movie that’s “just okay.” Really, it’s fine. And, for this critic, there’s something worse about “just okay” than “just terrible.” The punk side of my brain that thinks like Matt Smith’s character Russ might say: “It’s fucking boooring, mate!” And he would be right. It’s a collection of cameos and references and unoriginal Russian or Puerto Rican or Jewish bad guys with names like “Colorado” and “Microbe” running around the city waving guns and searching for a key that will unlock a storage container harboring four million dollars. Is it watchable? Sure. But if “watchable” has become synonymous with something worth your time, then it’s time to reconsider what cinema, in general, has to offer you.
If it feels like I’m “panning out” here, I am. I’d like to return briefly to Aronofsky’s filmography and reiterate that Caught Stealing does, for better or worse, feel like the movie he needed to make. Part of that assessment comes from my perception of his previous theatrical release, The Whale, which is, without hyperbole, one of the worst films of the last twenty-five years. Early on in his career, Aronofsky created an equally miserabilist film called Requiem for a Dream, which I haven’t seen since it opened, but I seem to remember featuring the great Ellen Burstyn opposite a ridiculously anthropomorphized refrigerator puppet. I’ll stop short of unpacking the food issues this guy must have and move on to his occasional successful pivots, as with 2008’s The Wrestler, which seemed to work positively against the visual tendencies he saw himself repeating as a director across his first few films.
Then there was the somewhat interesting counterpart to The Wrestler in his ballet body-horror film Black Swan, followed by the better-than-you-might-expect biblical epic Noah in 2014, and the technically and temporally acrobatic and personal ode to the creative process, mother! in 2017. It’s difficult to believe that mother! comes from the same director as Caught Stealing. Where mother! is risky and ambitious and, perhaps, only successful by way of how utterly lofty and pretentious it’s willing to be, Caught Stealing feels like a movie with next to nothing on its mind. And that’s ok…as I said before. But I’d rather watch something with lofty ambitions that ultimately fails than something that aims for the middle and hits it dead on, but that seems to be where this director is at. And it’s just okay.
