Caught Stealing, like any good crime actioner, is full of surprises, but a couple of them are entirely on the audience’s side of the screen. For one, I cannot remember anyone in the film being caught stealing. It’s a baffling—and frankly, kind of weak—title for the film. True, it conjures up some of the tone and energy of the film you’re about to see, but surely something more plot-accurate could have been workshopped. Secondly, although the movie is directed by Darren Aronofsky, it is in no way yet explored “a Darren Aronofsky film.”
If the name doesn’t immediately click for you (I hear most people don’t pay attention to who directed a movie…which is crazy), Aronofsky rose to auteur notoriety in the 1990s, following his indie Gnostic Jewish numerology existential paranoia flick (yep), π, with the brilliant but oh-so-disturbing Requiem for a Dream. That film deserves a spot on my list of top films, but I have disqualified it (along with Seven and a few others) on the basis of trauma-inducing visuals. Next came The Fountain (which is very high on my list), wherein we learned that “death is the road to awe” and that vividly-filmed microscopic reactions work amazingly well as cosmic nebulae. If you’re on the more mainstream side of things, you likely first came across Aronofsky, however, with his twin films on the corruption of gender (although I have never seen another critic speak about them in that way), The Wrestler and Black Swan, which were big awards contenders as well as brilliant (and disturbing) films.
But. Then.
2014’s ship full of dung, Noah, showed us that the director could slip and fall—badly. Thankfully, his next film, mother!, was another masterpiece—albeit an intentionally hard-to-watch one. That film is an intricate allegory for nothing short than world history, from Eden to Golgotha to the fracturing and politicizing of the Church. So many insights and misconceptions about religion are crammed into the ever-accelerating movie, and if you’ve got the courage and the time to dissect it, I highly recommend that you watch it, knowing ahead of time that it is a Christian allegory. After five years (and a stint dating Jennifer Lawrence), he returned with the Oscar darling The Whale, which is just a stupid movie with a great cameo by Samantha Morton.
None of that experimental religious intellectualism can prepare you for the complete 180 that is Caught Stealing. The new film is not pretentious in any way, not really about the inscrutabilities of the universe, and certainly not an auteur film. It is, instead, a very well-made Hollywood action film anchored in the grime and crime of the NYC of 1998 (represent for the high school students who graduated that year, like me!). I am so happy that the nineties are “back”! Aronofsky nails the period by never fetishizing it. His is a wonderfully real and textured take on the Greatest Decade.
In that setting, twentysomething bartender Hank (Austin Butler) finds himself violently involved in his neighbor’s criminal affairs, which go right up to the top of the Hasidic underworld (hey, he couldn’t leave religion alone completely) in the persons of the wonderful Liev Schreiber and Vincent D’Onofrio in full bearded regalia. Hank’s girlfriend is played with perfect cool-but-natural ease by Zoe Kravitz (whose father was, as I hope you know, a big deal at the time the film is set in). The main cast is filled out by Regina King (in perhaps my favorite of her performances) as a streetwise cop and Matt Smith (unrecognizable in nineties London punk styling) as the shadily-connected chap in the flat next door. Oh, and a cat. (How many great films include a self-possessed cat sidekick? So many!)
Clearly, though, this is Butler’s movie, and he fully redeems himself from the horror of Elvis with a full-throttle wrong-man action performance. The violence in the film keeps escalating in terms of frequency and gore, but it remains Aronofsky’s least upsetting film nonetheless. It’s so gratifying to see a ubiquitous genre executed with such perfection! This film is a great time—as long as you’re on the audience’s side of the screen. I don’t think any of the characters enjoyed the ride.
Coming soon to B.A.D. Reviews: Speaker for the Dead, Lindsay Anderson’s Mick Travis trilogy, and an essay on the true nature of art criticism!