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| Images courtesy of Sony Pictures |
Caught Stealing, the
ninth and newest feature film by American master filmmaker Darren Aronofsky,
the man behind such critically renowned yet blisteringly heavy and hyperkinetic
psychological warfare as Pi, Requiem for a Dream and most
recently The Whale, is at long last the closest thing the controversial
hard-hitting provocateur has made to a lark.
While ostensibly a genre thriller as neo-noir with unexpected twists and
turns that harken back to his debut, for once Aronofsky is plainly having fun
in his favorite locale of Coney Island, Brooklyn from its beaches to its
carnival walk and supermarkets swarming with Hasidic Jews. The only ingredient missing here is a King
Neptune combing the beaches for coins. In
his most straight-laced feature since The Wrestler, adapted for the
screen from his own novel of the same name by Charlie Huston, it feels
somewhere between Guy Ritchie, the Safdies, Martin Scorsese and, well, plain
old Darren Aronofsky who manages to rework many of his leitmotifs and tropes
into the standard genre entertainment.
The result is perhaps the ordinarily confrontational painter of
difficult characters and/or situations at his most playful or impish.
Set in 1998 in New York’s Lower East Side, Henry “Hank”
Thompson (Austin Butler) whiles his nights away bartending amid loving his paramedic
girlfriend Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz) and drowning his sorrows in booze over a drunk-driving
incident that killed his friend and ended his baseball career. Passing through is his British mohawked punk
neighbor Russ (Matt Smith) who leaves his cat Bud with Hank to watch while he
visits his ailing father. One morning,
two Russian mobsters Aleksei (Yuri Kolokolnikov) and Pavel (Nikita Kukushkin)
searching for Russ proceed to brutally beat up Hank who loses a kidney and the
capacity for drinking in the process. After
narcotics Detective Elise Roman (Regina King) informs Hank of Russ’
drug-dealing operations connected to two gun-toting Hasidic Jewish brothers
Lipa (Liev Schreiber) and Shmully Drucker (Vincent D’Onofrio), Hank finds
himself both on the run to clear his name while also tempted to discover what’s
driving this criminally violent world he’s been thrust into.
An ensemble action-crime comedy filmed with gritty
grain-heavy finesse by day-one creative collaborator and cinematographer Matthew
Libatique, edited with a whip by recurring editor Andrew Weisblum in perhaps
the most overtly 1990s New York City oriented thrill-ride since the director’s
flickering black-and-white debut, Caught Stealing is very plainly Aronofsky’s
most broadly appealing picture to date.
The kind of thriller you saw countless times in the 1990s but with a
refreshing patina mixing urban paranoia with a crime caper, Aronofsky has
gleeful fun working through familiar tropes in a manner that surprises even
staunch genre fans, like the hero Hank himself we picture Aronofsky battering
up for a modestly sized home run in ostensibly the director’s Catch Me if
You Can.
As with his other films, it
is a sonic marvel replete with a brilliant score by The Whale composer
Rob Simonsen performed by British post-punk band Idles and punchy deep sound
engineering in Dolby Atmos. Featuring a
murderer’s row of a cast including some surprises I won’t dare disclose here,
everyone here is pitch perfect with Austin Butler in a fiercely physical
performance as an actor largely on the run or getting into fistfights. Regina King as the mercurial narcotics
detective is fantastic in a role reminiscent of Aronofsky’s Pi with its
pressing Wall Streeter played by Pamela Hart.
Matt Smith’s in his most punkish role since Lost River while Liev
Schreiber and Vincent D’Onofrio might be the film’s funniest as well as most
dangerous partners in crime. And of
course there’s Bud the Cat played by Tonic, a little biter of a cat which
becomes something of a mascot for the film in the same way the tabby in Inside
Llewyn Davis did.
At once the least like his other films yet clearly
entrenched within his stomping grounds of Coney Island Brooklyn while reworking
many of the tropes like peering through keyholes or bumping into Stanley B.
Herman or running down subways, Caught Stealing is something of a bridge
between a standard genre offering and Aronofsky-ville which should tickle fans
new and old pink. From its crazy credits
sequence which you should sit through to see an animated cat walking about the
screen before ending up in a director’s chair to its stellar technical
filmmaking which is always at a high organic level, this is one of the year’s
real escapist treats in easily the director’s first real lighthearted work
while still dealing in dark weathers.
Austin Butler is fantastic, the film is unmistakably the work of a
master clearly having fun for a change giving audiences a chance to get a whiff
of his surprisingly wicked sense of humor.
The closest thing the ordinarily arthouse auteur has made to a B-movie.
--Andrew Kotwicki
