‘Caught Stealing’ Review
Darren Aronofsky returns to fertile ground.
DARREN ARONOFSKY’S REQUIEM FOR A DREAM (2000) is a penetrating film for a variety of reasons—for its editing rhythms, for its visual mastery, for its soul-searing Clint Mansell score performed by the Kronos Quartet—but especially for its choice of lead character. None of the junkies with a dream are the true heroes of that picture. No, the protagonist is a concept, an idea.
Addiction. It’s a movie in which every story beat is driven by addiction—to heroin, to food, to the promise of fame—and its drive to defeat the human spirit, to beat it into submission. It’s this, ultimately, that makes Requiem so hard to watch. Not the rotten abscesses in needle-scarred veins we see the characters suffer, nor their sexual degradation. No, it’s the fact that every little bit of debasement is driven by the true hero of the film, the beating heart of the movie. Addiction.
Aronofsky has visited addiction and other self-destructive compulsions throughout his career: Black Swan and The Wrestler view it through an athletic-artistic lens; Pi via intellectual obsession; Noah through a genocidal one; The Whale, unfortunately, through Grubhub.
Caught Stealing returns to this idea, that of the self-destructive addict. But for the first time, Aronofsky offers a glimmer of hope, a chance of redemption. It won’t be easy for Hank Thompson (Austin Butler) to kick the compulsion that defines his life. He will suffer along the way and others will suffer on his behalf. But for the first time, the light at the end of the tunnel isn’t just a freight train bearing down on him.
Hank’s crucible starts one night on the Lower East Side in 1998 when he does his friend and neighbor, punk rocker Russ (Matt Smith), a favor. He agrees to watch the man’s cat. That empty apartment is then visited by psychotic Russians, a Puerto Rican club owner with a penchant for stories about pistolas, two Hasidic drug runners, and a cop who swears she can get him out of this mess if she just helps him find out where Russ has hidden whatever it is that this band of brigands wants.
But Hank’s biggest problem isn’t any of these folks; he is, like so many Aronofsky leads, his own worst enemy. Hank was a baseball prodigy, one whose career hit the skids thanks to drink. And he hasn’t stopped drinking since he fled California and came to New York City. And he doesn’t stop drinking after Aleksei (Yuri Kolokolnikov) and Pavel (Nikita Kukushkin) beat him so badly he loses a kidney. And he doesn’t stop drinking after his paramedic girlfriend, Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz), tells him he has to stop because, you know, of the one-kidney thing. And he doesn’t stop after he pukes his guts out, strips naked in front of his building, and blacks out an important piece of information that winds up getting a whole bunch of his friends and colleagues killed. Whether or not he can stop is the question he, and the film, strives to answer.
I don’t want to be overly dour here, and shall interrupt the sermon to confirm that Caught Stealing is probably the most-fun movie Aronofsky’s ever made, excepting possibly the camp delights of Black Swan. It’s not quite a lark and Charlie Huston’s script (adapted from his own 2004 novel of the same name) puts the black in black comedy, for sure. But Butler is a fantastically physical comedian, throwing himself around the streets and alleys and fire escapes of New York City with abandon, doing pratfalls off barstools and pool tables and whatever else. And there’s a fine comic timing to the editing beats in this movie, as when we smash cut to Hank, nude, in an old Hasidic woman’s home, Lipa (Liev Schreiber) and Shmully (Vincent D’Onofrio) looming over him, the two finally believing his claims that he does not have the thing they’re looking for.
That said, there is a depth to Caught Stealing that reveals itself over the course of the film, in part via Hank’s degradation and in part through the repeated flashes to a recurring nightmare he has, the dream he snaps awake from every night, a scream stifled in his throat. It’s a movie about a man suffering, a man in need of an absolution that can only come through self-control.
And that—even that mere sliver of a possibility that things could get better—is a rare commodity indeed in Darren Aronofsky’s moral universe.
I've had Requiem for a Dream on the brain a lot lately, in part because of the trailer for Him, which feels like Marlon Wayans's first dramatic role since the Aronofsky film in question....