Darren Aronofsky has been making movies for nearly 30 years, and for nearly 30 years it seems like he’s been angry at the audience for watching them. The typical Aronofsky joint is emotionally turbulent, often to the point of actual nausea. And while some are more accessible than others, he’s never been terribly interested in cutting us some slack and modulating his tone. His bleakest movies, like “Requiem for a Dream” and “Mother!”, are indistinguishable from panic attacks and anxiety nightmares. His most enjoyable movies — if you can call them that — are still pretty damned bleak. Unless you’re like me, and you were so desperate for Aronofsky to cut his characters some slack that you think the semi-ambiguous ending of “The Wrestler” meant everything turned out fine.
The new film “Caught Stealing” has Aronofsky’s name on it, but I’m not sure it’s the same filmmaker. Maybe it’s one of those “Paul Anderson” things, where one or both of these guys will have to start using their middle initials to avoid confusion. “Caught Stealing” isn’t an assault on the senses or an exercise in abject misery. It’s actually a pulpy crime story with good humor and spiffy characters who, yeah, sure seem to die a lot but it’s only a tragedy for like, one or two of them.
“Caught Stealing” stars Austin Butler as Hank, whose promising baseball career was cut short after a brutal car accident. Now he works as a bartender, boozing his days away and boinking all through the night with his girlfriend, Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz). One night, betwixt the boozing and boning, his punk neighbor Russ (Matt Smith) announces that his father is dying and he has to fly overseas, so he tells — not asks, tells — Hank to take care of his cat for a few days.
This completely screws over Hank’s life. It’s not the cat’s fault. The cat loves Hank. We kinda love Hank too. He knows his life is in the crapper but his coping mechanisms aren’t hurting anyone but himself, at least not yet, and they’re not even hurting him that much. He’s a decent human being who doesn’t even like cats, but he’ll spend the whole movie taking care of this little furball just because it’s the right thing to do. Even when every violent criminal in New York wants to stomp his butt into oblivion.
You see, Russ was into some serious trouble. The Russian mafia tries to beat down Russ’ door, and when Hank suggests that they maybe not do that, they beat Hank up so badly he loses one of his kidneys. I must say whoever did his sutures knew their business, because after only two days in the hospital Hank spends the rest of the week sprinting through New York City, falling on his ass and getting the crap kicked out of him again and again and again, and those stitches remain tight and indestructible. At least until someone tries to rip them on purpose. Ouch.
Hank’s misadventures wind up involving millions of dollars in missing money, a detective named Roman (Regina King), a torturous gangster named Colorado (Bad Bunny) and two homicidal Orthodox Jewish mobsters (Liev Schreiber and Vincent D’Onofrio), which is a lot to unpack.
“Caught Stealing” takes place in 1998, the same year Aronofsky’s breakout feature “Pi” debuted. It was a sci-fi thriller about math, the stock market and the Torah, and it also took place in New York City. Perhaps that’s as far as Aronofsky thought out those characters in “Caught Stealing,” as stray references to the film that made him a star. It wouldn’t be the first time he opened a can of worms without knowing the first thing about worms.
But maybe that’s too playful, even for this hip new version of Aronofsky. I scanned the periphery of “Caught Stealing” for any sign of Max Cohen, the ill-fated protagonist of “Pi,” and I couldn’t find him. Next time I’ll check the corners of the exterior street scenes. Maybe I’ll see the younger version of Aronofsky, filming his first feature. But probably not. He’s having fun this time, but that doesn’t suddenly make him a mischievous scamp.
The most meta Aronofsky seems willing to get is casting Griffin Dunne as Hank’s boss, since Dunne starred in Martin Scorsese’s “After Hours.” That’s the darkest of all the New York City dark comedies, about another hapless boob who’s perpetually screwed over by circumstances outside of his control. But even that reference may have been a miscalculation. “After Hours” has a stronger point of view than “Caught Stealing,” a profound sense that the universe is making this person a punching bag for committing the tiniest of sins. It was Scorsese after all, so of course it plays like a Catholic cautionary tale.
“Caught Stealing” doesn’t amount to anything nearly so profound, or even as pathetic. To quote “The Simpsons,” Aronofsky’s film is “just a bunch of stuff that happened.” Sure, Hank grows as a character. But one never gets the impression that he needed to go through all this over-the-top bullcrap to get there. Nor does one ever feel like Aronofsky is toying with Hank’s fate like a sadistic puppet master with a message on his mind.
Hank’s just a guy who gets in over his head, meets some wacky people, gets far too many people killed by accident, and takes care of a cat. That’s enough to be entertaining, even if it’s not quite enough to be great.
However, I can’t help but applaud Aronofsky for switching it up. I wasn’t sure I’d ever forgive him after the miserable fat-shaming dreck that was “The Whale,” and frankly I still haven’t and probably never will, but at least he’s extending an olive branch. At last, an Aronofsky film where it doesn’t feel like he hates us. O brave new world, that has such movies in it.
