Darren Aronofsky, at 56, has “no shooters,” according to something called “Film Twitter” (which still exists, more embittered and paralyzed than ever). It’s true, he’s not a “cool” director, hasn’t been for a while, and more importantly, he hasn’t made that many movies. The trailers for his latest, Caught Stealing, had a title card that read “THE DIRECTOR OF REQUIEM FOR A DREAM, THE WRESTLER, BLACK SWAN,” films released in 2000, 2008, and 2010; during the 2010s, he only made two movies, 2014’s mega budget Noah and 2017’s riotous and punishing mother!. Aronofsky returned five years later with The Whale, a thoroughly earnest and widely-mocked drama about addiction and suicide. Brendan Fraser won a well-deserved Oscar, but the movie (and his performance) were consigned to the Oscar Bait bin as soon as the ceremonies were over. Perhaps the most enduring image from The Whale is a frequently circulated meme of Fraser’s character offering the viewer a blunt.
Aronofsky is, by all accounts, not cool. He shows up in Lizzy Goodman’s early-aughts New York oral history Meet Me in the Bathroom, described by DFA owner Tim Goldsworthy: “Darren Aronofsky would turn up at Plant Bar with a wifebeater on, leaning on the bar, ‘Hey, guys, what are you drinking?’ He’s such a tosser. He really reminds me of the super-nerdy Dungeons and Dragons kid who really wants to be cool.” I think about this quote whenever I hear, read, or see anything involving Aronofsky. It doesn’t bother me. But it does come up. I’m not surprised he has no advocates and few defenders in what’s left of the “critical community;” at the same time, some of the films are undeniable, especially Black Swan.
Caught Stealing is Aronofsky’s memory movie, set in the Lower East Side in 1998. Unlike Tarantino, Anderson, Cuarón, Fincher, and Spielberg, Caught Stealing isn’t set during the director’s childhood, but the year that he made his feature film debut with Pi. The result is something less reflective than ballistic, a pure genre movie made by an underrated director caught between the mainstream and the press who dismissed him years ago as a charlatan. Maybe Aronofsky is insincere, maybe he read The Whale and thought Oscarrrrrrrrrr first and foremost—it doesn’t matter, the movie worked. With the bar so low, this looks like the craft of a master. But, again, it’s just a gangster movie.
Austin Butler stars as Hank, a bartender in the Lower East Side and former Major League Baseball prospect, just another guy in the city. He’s really not up to much, sidelined years ago by a broken leg and a far more traumatic car accident that left his friend dead, and he’s only thrown into the plot because he agrees to take care of his English neighbor’s cat. Played by Matt Smith, Russ is a mohawked punk of all time, already a prefab leather studded cliché 20 years after Sid Vicious OD’d uptown; Butler’s only sartorial nod to the period is, briefly, wearing a short-sleeve t-shirt over a long sleeve t-shirt. Aronofsky resists the fetishism of his peers and never allows the camera to linger on landlines, 12-inch TV’s, or answering machines. He sets the scene at the beginning with a shot of the Twin Towers at night, followed by a clip of The Jerry Springer Show playing in a laundromat in long shot.
Much of what follows resembles that “talk” show. Russ leaves for London to visit his ailing father and leaves his cat with Hank; the next morning, two Ukrainian gangsters show up at Russ’ door, and Hank makes the movie happen by opening the door. “Hey, watch the bagel.” They beat the shit out of him, in a scene that’s just beyond the kind of violence you see in gangster movies, maybe two minutes longer, three extra kicks; you expect Hank to land in the hospital, but not to lose a kidney—this is before he’s done anything. But he loves that cat, and his girl Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz), who’s unexpectedly WACKED only a half hour into the movie—a third of her work is in the trailer. Things get worse. Regina King plays a crooked detective willing to let Hank slide if he would only cooperate and give her and the Russian gangsters the key to a storage space with $100,000. It would be so easy. But he’s a good friend, and smarter than the average bear. A dozen people end up dead, but Hank’s redeemed, another one of Aronofsky’s sacred and saved.
His most accessible film yet, Caught Stealing is greatly enhanced by Aronofsky’s canny sense of casting: Liev Schreiber and Vincent D’Onofrio show up as Hasidic gangsters (along with their bubbe Carol Kane), Griffin Dunne plays Butler’s ponytailed boss in an obvious but not obnoxious nod to After Hours, and, in an uncredited one-shot cameo at the very end of the movie, Laura Dern shows up as Hank’s mom. They’re both massive fans of the San Francisco Giants, and they get to win in the end; just as people really die and our hero really gets hurt, their enemies are obliterated, dispatched with rapid gunfire or blunt force trauma.
Unfortunately, through no fault of its own, Caught Stealing is another reminder how far production values have fallen in the last half decade. This is a well-made gangster comedy, and it’s impressive, but it really shouldn’t be—this is what Nobody 2 should look like. Aronofsky wanted to “make something fun” after The Whale, and he’s delivered; but for a guy nearing 60, he should’ve made more movies by now. How many more on the level of Black Swan or even the still shocking mother! are left? One distracting note: the Twin Towers are later seen twice during the day, and in both shots, the top of the South Tower is totally inaccurate, very sloppy work. I need a still to be sure, but it was noticeably off, something an AI would spit out. But these shots are brief, because besides setting the scene, Aronofsky isn’t interested in dwelling on his youth—he just wants to throttle through it again.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @RoosterQuibbits