When the trailer first came out for Caught Stealing, it sold us a very different mood than we might be used to from Darren Aronofsky, a violent-but-fun punky caper with an eclectic cast of multi-ethnic gangsters and a cute cat caught up in the middle of it. On the surface, that is what the final product delivers, but it turns out that Aronofsky’s trademark grimdark misery is lurking just below, understandably hidden from the marketing. The result is a complete tonal mess, halfway between a goofy underworld adventure and a physically and psychologically agonising descent into hell, each tonal half weakening the other, leading to a film that gets the worst of both worlds and the best of neither.
Scripted by Charlie Huston adapting his own novel, Caught Stealing takes us back to late-‘90s New York, in which former baseball protégé and current alcoholic barman Hank Thompson (Austin Butler) is scraping an underwhelming but just-comfortable-enough living alongside his girlfriend Yvonne (Zoe Kravitz). This all goes to hell when Hank’s sketchy British punk neighbour Russ (Matt Smith in nonsense accent mode) leaves town on short notice, saddling Hank with cat-sitting duties that get him mistaken for an accomplice of Russ by a string of diverse mobs (Russian, Puerto Rican, and Hasidic mafias are all involved).
See, Russ has been sitting on millions of dollars in cash, and now it’s up to Hank to first try and prove that he knows nothing about it and then, inevitably failing that, collect the money for all the people threatening to do various horrible things to him. Exactly how seriously we’re meant to take these horrors (and there are some really nasty bits of violence and cruel plotting here) basically changes scene by scene and the cast struggle with this uncertainty, some traumas just laughed off, others deadly earnest in their misery, at least until the next designated Silly Bit comes along.
The main casualty of this is, sadly, Butler. He’s not quite *bad*, but that lightning bolt charisma he lit up the screen with in Elvis and Dune 2 is muted in the confusion. Smith and the various gangsters (highlights being Liev Schreiber and Vincent D’Onofrio as Orthodox Jewish enforcers) are saved by getting to play things much more broadly, but Kravitz is really given nothing to do. It means the final feeling you’re left with, despite some entertaining individual sequences (a climactic piece of vehicular mayhem does undeniably get the blood pumping), is a rather empty one, though I do have to give credit to the animal wrangler – the cat performance here is one of the best in recent years.
Caught Stealing is really not helped by the fact that it’s being released right alongside Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest, another New York crime thriller that just does everything so much better; the pair even share a cinematographer in Matthew Libatique, who still puts in good work here, but not half as interesting as what he’s doing with Lee. Kinetic and mean, there’s definitely some diversion to be found here, but Aronofsky lets all his worst instincts take hold far too often; Caught Stealing is too silly to be profound and too miserable to be fun.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 