I was expecting very little from "Caught Stealing," the latest Darren Aronofsky film. The discourse around this one has been very, very quiet, and I completely missed the initial release. It was at the tail end of my "To Watch" list for a while, because while I recognize and appreciate Aronofsky's talent as a filmmaker, his work is generally so bleak and nihilistic that I rarely enjoy his films. Well, I enjoyed "Caught Stealing." This might even be my favorite Aronofsky film.
Written by Charlie Huston, and based on his book of the same name, "Caught Stealing" follows a bartender named Hank (Austin Butler) who inadvertently becomes embroiled in a conflict involving at least two New York criminal organizations, when he agrees to watch a cat belonging to a disreputable neighbor, Russ (Matt Smith). Set in Lower East Side Manhattan in 1998, "Caught Stealing" features a New York that is grungy, dirty, largely ungentrified, and full of people of every ethnicity living on top of each other. It is also a very violent film, with Hank constantly on the run from terrible people, and his own life marked by the memory of past traumas. Because it's Darren Aronofsky, the violence is graphic and upsetting. Yet somehow, the movie avoids being bleak, and might even qualify as intermittently fun by the time the credits roll.
This is accomplished largely due to two things. First is the performance of Austin Butler, playing a baseball-loving, hard-drinking, but generally decent guy who keeps trying to do the right thing, keeps getting knocked down for it, and gives us someone to root for. He's got plenty of charisma, and yet he also fits the nastiness of the surroundings. He credibly gets into very physical fights, and does a great job of adjusting to each new phase of the story as it keeps morphing into different things. And the film's unpredictability is its other major strength, where Hank keeps being thrown into one unlikely situation after another, with a parade of colorful characters. One minute he's in the middle of a ridiculous car chase with Russ and a corrupt police officer, and the next he's having dinner with a nice Jewish lady played by Carol Kane, the mother of the Drucker brothers (Liev Schreiber, Vincent D'Onofrio), a pair of Hasidic mobsters.
Darren Aronofsky manages to juggle a lot of disparate elements and some serious tonal whiplash. This is a story where Russian thugs send Hank to the hospital in the first act, and several nasty deaths occur, and yet there's room for Hank being cute with his girlfriend Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz) and several appearances by the grouchy cat. It has all the uncomfortable subjective tactility and emotional intensity of Aronofsky's earlier, more paranoid films, but it sidesteps the existential horror. Hank experiences tragedy, but unlike most of Aronofsky's other protagonists, he's not a tragic character. His jaunts into subjective introspection reveal that he's got his reasons for angst, but he's perfectly redeemable and I was pleasantly surprised to see him successfully work through a lot of his personal baggage.
It feels strange, spotting all of these stylistic flourishes that I associate with Aronofsky's grimmest work being used to tell a story that feels so un-Aronofsky. There are a few places where the dissonance was too much for me, but in the end I found that I liked "Caught Stealing" very much. It's chaotic while still being perfectly coherent, and pulls off some great surprises, especially when it comes to the cast. I didn't recognize Schreiber or D'Onofrio at all in their Hasidic regalia. Matt Smith delivered my favorite performance, sporting a massive mohawk and studded leather jacket, and seemed to be having a ball playing a total reprobate. Regina King, Bad Bunny, Action Bronson, and Griffin Dunne also appear in roles I will not spoil.
After "mother!" and "The Whale," I was resigned to cringing my way through all future Darren Aronofsky projects, but "Caught Stealing" gives me hope that this doesn't have to be so. I'd like very much for this this is a new direction for him, and not just a brief digression from his nihilistic norm.
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