Movie Review: Caught Stealing
Throughout director Darren Aronofsky’s career, he’s established himself as a director who handles heavy subjects with a visceral vision. Movies like Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan, mother!, and The Whale deal with hard subjects like addiction and loneliness, and Aronofsky has never held back from the harshness of these subjects. His movies, to this point, have been well-made, but intense and at times shocking.
Aronofsky’s newest film, Caught Stealing, is far and away his most fun and easy-going film to date. While it still deals with subject matters that could be seen as heavy, like guilt and alcoholism, Aronofsky focuses on the energy and excitement of the film rather than on its themes. The result is an entertaining film, but one that stumbles towards its finale.
Set in 1998 New York City, Caught Stealing finds Austin Butler as Hank Thompson, a once-great baseball prospect whose career was derailed following a car accident that blew out his knee and killed his teammate. He is now a bartender at a dive bar, is obsessed with the San Francisco Giants, and has a diet of Miller High Life and whiskey. When Hank’s neighbor, Russ (Matt Smith), asks him to watch his cat so he can go out of town to visit his ailing father, Hank reluctantly agrees. Hank quickly finds himself in a web of violence, corruption, and theft over stolen money connected to Russ.
Caught Stealing starts as a wrong-guy-wrong-place movie. Hank lives a relatively unexciting life. He has the Giants, phone calls with his mom, late-night hookups with Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz), the bar he works at and its regular patrons, and his alcohol. It is established that he and Russ are cordial neighbors but not necessarily best friends, and that Hank knows nothing of Russ’s extracurriculars, which puts Hank in a lot of unfortunate situations, like getting beaten up by Russian mobsters, being hunted by a pair of cold blooded Hasidic Jews (Vincent D’Onofrio and Liev Schrieber, absolute scene stealers) with quick trigger fingers, and constantly in contact with Detective Roman (Regina King).
The longer Hank continues the journey to figure out what exactly is going on, the messier his life and the movie get. Bullets begin to fly, and bodies start to stack up at an alarming rate. Most of the shootouts are exciting, and some of the torture scenes done to Hank are brutal in classic Aronofsky form. By the third act of the film, Caught Stealing started to get redundant. It felt like every other scene, somebody was dying, whether they were a random henchman or someone close to Hank. It was as if screenwriter Charlie Huston (who also wrote the book the film is based on) ran out of gas in terms of character development and story, and rather than tie it all up in 90 minutes, he filled in the extra twenty minutes with violence.
What keeps Caught Stealing compelling throughout its messiness is the performance by Austin Butler. Butler, who has given several great performances over the past few years in films like Elvis and Dune Part Two, is once again excellent as Hank. Butler’s range of emotions is impressive throughout Caught Stealing as he is forced to showcase scenes of fear, pain, anger, sadness, and remorse, and he does so effortlessly. And through all of it, he never loses his movie star charm, which always has us rooting for Hank. Although the portrayal of alcoholism and the story of guilt are underdeveloped, Butler does his best with the material given, and his moment of catharsis at the end of the film ultimately worked for me.
Caught Stealing is fantastic entertainment. While it loses steam towards the end, Aronofsky’s craftsmanship and Butler’s performance keep the film going and make it a gem to finish off the summer.
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