The central tension of Caught Stealing — an ostensibly breezy “wrong man” comedic-thriller set in Giuliani-era New York City that finds our besieged main character, Hank (Austin Butler, inhabiting the role with the tossed-off, slightly sleepy, charm of a young Brad Pitt), on the run from a colorful collection of killers — is that it’s also directed by Darren Aronofsky. A filmmaker not known for being light on his feet, Aronofsky historically makes self-serious explorations of obsession and purification through fire with a particular interest in the deterioration of the flesh. When trailers dropped for Caught Stealing scored to The Clash and featuring literal save-the-cat hijinks and shots of Butler and costar Zoë Kravitz adorably pawing at one another (complete with an old biddy passing them in the hallway telling them to “get a room”), it was fair to wonder if the filmmaker had abandoned his more dour sensibilities for something a bit more multiplex-friendly. It wouldn’t be the first-time either: we’re a little more than a decade removed from the filmmaker’s Noah, a would-be biblical epic that also features CGI rock monsters for some reason. Auteurists may rejoice then. In many key respects — thematically, geographically, tonally — this is recognizably from the same filmmaker as Black Swan and mother! But therein lies the rub: Caught Stealing finds the filmmaker trying to smuggle a punitive perspective into a Hitchcockian lark, and the two conflicting modes simply cannot be reconciled. If we’re supposed to be having such a good time, why does it instead feel like we’re being abused?
Taking place in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1998 — the film features so many digitally augmented shots of the still standing World Trade Center towers in the skyline that it starts to feel like a perverse joke — we encounter Hank tending bar at a hole in the wall, fervently tracking the fortunes of the San Francisco Giants on the television. A coveted baseball prospect in high school, Hank ruined his shot at the majors after a car accident tore up his knee and killed his best friend, so now he drunkenly whiles away his late-20s, refusing to ever get behind the wheel again (good thing he moved to New York then). Hank’s also a doting mama’s boy who calls his mother in California every day, ending each call with a rote “go Giants,” before falling into bed with his paramedic girlfriend Yvonne (Kravitz) who is herself tired of dragging him home from the bar every night (his entire apartment is essentially one giant open container). But the character is, some minor flaws notwithstanding, a mensch. So much so, in fact, that he gets roped into looking after his cockney punk rocker neighbor Russ’ (Matt Smith) cat while Russ flies back to the UK to tend to his sick father, despite Hank claiming to be more of a dog person. And that’s precisely when the trouble starts. A procession of unsavory-looking characters keep trying to break into Russ’ apartment, and Hank keeps getting caught in the crossfire, at one point even being beaten so badly by a couple Russian skinheads (Nikita Kukushkin and Yuri Kolokolnikov) that he loses a kidney.
In short order, Hank is being threatened by a pistol-packing, Puerto Rican gangster (musician Bad Bunny, credited here under his given name of Benito Martínez Ocasio), a narcotics detective who uses humor to conceal a sharp edge (Regina King) and a couple of Hasidic drug traffickers (Vincent D’Onofrio and Liev Schrieber) who are pointedly referred to as “scary monsters.” With Russ temporarily out of the picture, everyone believes Hank has something of value that they’re all chasing after, but like Dustin Hoffman’s character in Marathon Man, he has no idea what that is and is similarly on the receiving end of considerable physical torture to no real end. With Hank and his loved ones in constant danger — Caught Stealing takes a particularly upsetting turn in attempting to up the stakes, tearing the heart out of the film in the process — he’s forced to lam it across a handful of New York enclaves, often with Russ’ cat tucked under his arm. As bodies continue to pile up and Hank is fitted to take the rap (or perhaps a bullet in the back of his head), he’s going to have to be quick on his feet, figure out what it is Russ left with him, and turn all these warring factions with competing agendas against one another if he stands any chance of surviving.
Working from a screenplay by Charlie Huston, adapted from their own novel, Caught Stealing plays as a series of escalating indignities and madcap chases that finds Butler’s character scaling fire escapes, scampering through Korean grocery stores, and riding shotgun in cars careening into street carts and bike racks. It all has the general shape of a disposable “beach read” that one stumbles upon late in the summer — one needn’t be as aspirational as Hitchcock here; a hypothetical Brett Ratner-directed version of the film would have packed them in for weeks if this were released roughly around the time in which it was set. Yet Aronofsky’s heavy hand is felt in nearly every scene and it keeps the film earthbound, tethered to a rather ugly reality that’s at cross-purposes with the how frivolous, bordering on cartoonishly broad, the film is. Violence draws real blood here — of both the literal and metaphorical variety — with a lot of people dying in agonizing ways; their bodies shown mangled, riddled with bullets, or lying in giant pools of their own blood. There’s also the sheer amount of physical punishment endured by the characters, and Butler in particular, who keeps accumulating bruises, welts, and wounds; at one point, he has surgical staples torn out of his side with pliers as part of enhanced interrogation. In his first wholesale leading role since starring in Elvis, Butler is instantly disarming as a kind of slacker dreamboat; the kind of goofball who can sell drunkenly singing along to Meredith Brooks’ alt-rock anthem “Bitch” while dancing on a pool table without appearing utterly ridiculous. The actor radiates an easygoing agreeability even as people are constantly putting a gun to his head (or even more vulnerable parts of his body). We want to see this character wriggle free of assorted snares by being quick on his feet, like when he weaponizes a crowd of rowdy Mets fans against one of his pursuers who has the misfortune of wearing Hank’s stolen Giants ball cap. It’s just unfortunate that Aronofsky keeps asking his leading man to piss blood or spray vomit on walls out of some misguided need for verisimilitude.
Spanning several boroughs — the film finds the director returning to some of the Coney Island locations of his Requiem for a Dream — Aronofsky instills in the film a strong sense of place in recreating a city on the cusp of gentrification, setting scenes amidst streets pocked with potholes and towering piles of trash (he also can’t help but include the storefront of the late and much-lamented Kim’s Video). In other words, Caught Stealing is the sort of film that you can practically smell. Working with longtime cinematographer Matthew Libatique, Aronofsky recreates a version of New York that’s funky, grimy, and thoroughly lived-in, lending the film enormous visual texture (not to mention a live-wire energy as scenes frequently spill across busy intersections and locations teeming with humanity), grounding the story in an instantly recognizable time and place. It feels like a personal touch, as is the film’s pitiless worldview, where good people routinely die badly.
Aronofsky injects an undercurrent of genuine menace into the proceedings but in a way that perhaps loses sight of the assignment. In both its urban decay and its steady accumulation of indignities, Caught Stealing desperately wants to evoke the one-thing-after-another delirium of After Hours, a connection only emphasized by casting one of the actors from that film in an almost unrecognizable role here. But Caught Stealing misses something a bit foundational about the Scorsese film: Griffin Dunne’s character, Paul, largely invites misfortune upon himself both through his own callousness and for having the temerity to “take a walk on the wild side,” which is what makes the film so mordantly funny. By comparison, Butler’s Hank receives near biblical levels of punishment largely because he’s at the wrong place at the wrong time or, even worse, because he’s trying to be a stand-up guy. The film keeps smacking him down as though he were a Jobian figure because that’s the prism through which Aronofsky views humanity; the only tool in his toolbox is the bludgeon. But that approach is in conflict with, say, scenes of our orthodox killers making a detour before a bloody public massacre to deliver a challah to their bubbe (Carol Kane) before the Sabbath or King’s character waxing rhapsodic about the famed black-and-white cookie as though the character had caught a rerun of Seinfeld only the night before. Pick a lane: you can do Guy Ritchie or you can do Cormac McCarthy, but you can’t do both at the same time.
DIRECTOR: Darren Aronofsky; CAST: Austin Butler, Zoë Kravitz, Regina, Matt Smith, Liev Schreiber; DISTRIBUTOR: Sony Pictures Releasing; IN THEATERS: August 29; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 49 min.
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