The brand new crime comedy Caught Stealing unfolds within the 12 months 1998, touring throughout a distinctly grungy New York Metropolis—all dingy subway platforms and drab Chinatown residences. The time-frame differs simply barely from that of the novel it’s based mostly on, which is about in 2000. I can consider just one cause the director, Darren Aronofsky, may need determined to make this tweak: The movie shares its time and place along with his debut function, Pi, which premiered that very same 12 months. The micro-budget manufacturing, which follows a paranoid mathematician looking for order within the chaos of numbers, established Aronofsky as a filmmaker desirous to push his imaginative and prescient of town as without delay shabby and beautiful.
That Caught Stealing echoes the scruffy, anything-goes ambiance of Aronofsky’s earliest work offers it a way of frenzied nostalgia. However the movie itself gives few indicators of the instances—aside from the epic collapse of that 12 months’s New York Mets within the playoff race, which is rudely proven within the background. The story is, relatively, a timeless story of mistaken identification: Austin Butler stars as a bartender chased round city by seemingly each member of town’s felony underworld, for causes unbeknownst to him. Aronofsky has, for the reason that grittiness of Pi and Requiem for a Dream, flitted with alacrity from style to style, attempting his hand at biblical epics (Noah) and claustrophobic dramas (The Whale). However Caught Stealing’s pitch-black, pulpy mode reveals the drawbacks of prioritizing type over all else.
The canine days of summer season—a interval that usually gives up stale or forgettable fare—do want extra movies like the type Aronofsky has tried to make: a horny, gritty thriller for grown-ups, starring a bunch of handsome stars. But Caught Stealing remembers, at greatest, a disposable Blockbuster rental from the period through which it’s set. Aronofsky has achieved an amazing job summoning a bygone Decrease Manhattan—the almost-derelict bars, crummy walk-ups, and greasy diners of yesteryear. (At one level, there’s even a distinguished shot of a black-and-white cookie, a metropolis staple.) The place Aronofosky is much less profitable, nonetheless, is making the motion as alluring as its romantic backdrop.
Butler performs Hank Thompson, who was on his solution to turning into a star ballplayer for his beloved San Francisco Giants earlier than a automotive crash ended his probabilities. Now his main pursuits embody flirting along with his girlfriend, Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz); operating his fingers by means of his lengthy, stringy blond hair; and partying onerous. Hank is supposedly dwelling on the backside of a bottle, struggling to remain afloat after his athletic goals have been dashed, however Butler (a really gifted performer) is just too charming and put collectively to promote that notion. When he unintentionally turns into accountable for cleansing up a drug supplier’s mess, Hank is curiously unperturbed, greeting violent threats, demise, and destruction with little greater than a wan sigh.
Hank is sucked into the disarray by his neighbor, a mohawked ne’er-do-well British punk named Russ (Matt Smith) who asks Hank to feed his cat for a couple of days whereas he makes a visit to London. Quickly sufficient, all kinds of strangers come calling seeking a key Russ left behind—together with aggressive Russian mobsters, two gun-toting Hasidim (Vincent D’Onofrio and Liev Schreiber), a hard-bitten NYPD detective (Regina King), and a gangster named Colorado (Dangerous Bunny). None of those characters rises above essentially the most cartoonish outlines, regardless of the general capability of their performers. I did respect Aronofsky throwing in extra items of stunt casting that paid homage to Decrease Manhattan–set movies of a long time previous. The actor Carol Kane seems for one large scene; she starred within the exceptional Hester Avenue, as a current immigrant struggling to assimilate on the flip of the twentieth century. There’s additionally a worthy half for Griffin Dunne, who led Martin Scorsese’s masterpiece After Hours—one other panicked story of New Yorker paranoia.
However referencing Scorsese, the eternally king of the New York crime film, is a danger Caught Stealing in all probability shouldn’t have taken. I spent a lot of the operating time reminiscing on simply how considerate and composed one of the best examples of this style will be, such because the classics New Jack Metropolis and King of New York and the newer Good Time—movies that discovered pathos within the lives of drug lords and petty criminals. Caught Stealing is much extra ragged across the edges; its characters’ solely motivations are searching for cash and hoping to outlive, aside from the saintly, underwritten Yvonne. Hank is introduced a special drawback: He’s handed a beating early that damages his kidneys, making it unwise for him to drink, but each time he swigs a beer after that, there’s nonetheless no sense of stakes—Butler is simply too implacably fairly a display presence to ever appear in real hazard.
I have no idea what to make of Aronofsky’s profession of late. Caught Stealing is healthier than the portentous and heavy-handed The Whale, however each movies have the vibe of a visually competent director intent on creating placing pictures. With The Whale, Aronofsky portrayed his extraordinarily chubby protagonist like a skyscraper-size monster, utilizing the constraints of the character’s cramped-apartment setting as a kind of directorial problem. In Caught Stealing, Aronofsky drops the viewer into an older New York as one other inventive train, however renders it as a playground for bloody and one-dimensional silliness. His ability as a cinematic storyteller is on show—I simply missed the narrative depth and hazard that used to return with the elegant photographs.
