The Poor Man's Aronofsky

It's like Darren Aronofsky is badly impersonating himself.

Austin Butler as Hank Thompson in Caught Stealing. Credit: Sony.

Grade: C+

“You see? Didn’t I tell you that man’s films were disgusting and worthless?” your maiden aunt said to you as you walked out of Darren Aronofsky’s 90s-set comedy crime film Caught Stealing. You’d taken the old pearl-clutcher to see the film to prove Aronofsky was one of the best filmmakers working today and that if she could just get over how uncomfortable it was to watch the morbidly obese English teacher Charlie in The Whale or the psycho-sexual disintegration of the ballerina Nina Sayers in Black Swan, she’d find some of the most intensely dramatic and humane films she’d ever seen. Now she’s gloating at you that she was right and you were wrong. When you try to work out why, you find yourself echoing Pauline Kael. In 1983, Kael wrote that Scarface, directed by Brian De Palma, whose films she’d championed as film critic for the New Yorker, was a “A De Palma Movie For People Who Don’t Like De Palma Movies.” You hear yourself calling Caught Stealing an Aronofsky film for people who don’t like Aronofsky films.

The film’s set in 1998. Does it get the 90s right? You’ll find it hard to judge if you weren’t born until the 2000s, but after seeing Caught Stealing you may wish you’d known the 90s in person or be glad you were born after the millennia turned over. Austin Butler plays former baseball player now barman Hank Thompson. Hanks works in a dive on Manhattan’s Lower East Side where every wall, payphone and shop’s roll-down shutters bear loud, punkish graffiti like a proud bikie’s tattoo. He lives in a one-bedroom flat next door to the full-blooded British punk Russ, played by Matt Smith. Those used to seeing Smith play more gentlemanly or aristocratic roles like the Eleventh Doctor in Doctor Who and Prince Phillip in The Crown will be shocked to see his hair congealed into three-foot long, oily blonde spikes and to hear Smith fire a barrage of cockney abuse at Hank, their Wall Street neighbour Dwain who designs websites (a possible, very innocently disguised harbinger of the internet age that will replace the 90s), and Russ’s criminal associates (more on them later). Zoe Kravitz plays Hank’s paramedic girlfriend Yvonne who carries a gun-shaped cigarette lighter but also a teasing spunk, the corners of her alluring smile turn up slightly, like curved and succulently baited fishhooks, while her glittering and petite eight-ball eyes never suggest a seductress or tramp, just a street-smart sheila like Lauren Bacall. “Welcome to fucking Narnia,” Russ tells Hank when Russ shows Hank his drug-money store (more on that later too). That sentence could preface the film like a welcome matt. New York in Caught Stealing is a grunge Wonderland that looks so edgy when you first see it you get the addictive dread, that sense you shouldn’t be watching this but want to watch it anyway, you got when you watched Aronofsky’s The Whale and Black Swan.

But that feeling soon dissolves. Russ’s dad suffers a stroke and Russ flies to London to be with his dad. He asks Hank to watch his cat. Russ doesn’t tell Hank he’s amidst brokering a big inter-gang drug deal. The gangs come looking for Russ while Hank’s cat-sitting and through a hilarious and terrifying cocktail mix of bad luck and stupidity on both sides Hank trips and falls headfirst into the action. The first casualty is Hank’s kidney. Two Russian gangsters beat him up bad and he must get it removed. Those confused about the medical science behind this have Kravitz’s Yvonne to explain it and also that Hank must quit drinking. You get the sense that’s not going to be easy despite Hank saying it will be. Yvonne finds half a dozen bottles of boos in his kitchen and Hank’s various flashbacks to some past trauma, that will become clear with the passing of time, make you think he’s using it for repression. After she explains the medical side to Hank and takes him home from hospital, Yvonne asks him if he’s going to face what he’s been drowning at the bottom of his bottles. “If you run away from what you’re afraid of, then it owns you,” she tells him. Hank is supposed to be the part of you who messes up and runs from it. Butler has a handsome seediness to him, like a less well-groomed and quieter John Wayne, and it looks right on this frustrated former baseball prodigy. But he’s not the same pure idol of gluttony Brendan Fraser was as Charlie in The Whale or of helpless, childish innocence like Natalie Portman was as Nina in Black Swan. Butler’s acting isn’t the problem. He sinks into this role, drowns himself in the character, absorbing Hank and becoming him all through, just as he did in his breakout role as Elvis Presley in Baz Lurhmann’s Elvis and as the sociopathic space warrior Feyd-Rautha in Dune: Part Two. The problem is the character. Hank isn’t eating himself to death like Charlie and he’s not an adult-sized child, sexually ignorant and still living with her mummy, like Nina. Compared to them, Hank is just a man who drinks too much and needs a haircut.

Cinema, like all art, is a drug and Darren Aronofsky is a dealer in hard drugs, or at least he was in The Whale and Black Swan. You wanted to keep watching those films even though you were scared and disgusted by what you saw because what you saw was your own demons. Aronofsky’s best characters are the parts of yourself you don’t want to talk about but writ large. That’s what gave The Whale and Black Swan a biting edge that cut into you and made them unforgettable. Their protagonists were your own dark reflections dancing before your eyes inside the screen’s looking glass. Hank is not as darkly compelling. Yvonne’s urging him to face his demons is a footnote in what’s largely a spiky screwball comedy, not unlike Anora, that’s part Howard Hawks’ His Girl Friday and part De Palma’s Scarface and where jokes, slapstick, curses and bullets fly in equal measure and speed. Caught Stealing resembles an empty hedgehog-shaped piggy bank embezzled with punk rock stickers: it looks edgy on the outside but less so underneath.

Caught Stealing is cheap Aronofsky. It’s a poor man’s Aronofsky, like Aronofsky is badly impersonating himself. Unlike Aronofsky’s Black Swan and The Whale, you can watch it and then go on with your life undisturbed. Any edginess in the film is purely superficial.