If Darren Aronofsky's Caught Stealing is his apology for his disastrously misguided The Whale, then I wholeheartedly accept it. Turns out all he needed to do was stage an anxiety-ridden dark comedy in the grand tradition of Josh Safdie and Benny Safdie's Uncut Gems. Truth be told, it might be the best film he's ever done, one that bursts with incredible confidence from the minute it opens and constantly enthralls as its protagonist, Henry "Hank" Thompson (Austin Butler) further gets into trouble.
For those expecting a more crowd-pleasing affair from one of our most polarizing auteurs, Aronofsky has not once left his most provocative and downright button-pushing sensibilities at the door. This is still very much a film that only the director of Requiem for a Dream and Mother! could ever come to life, particularly in how it's always formally inventive and is in constant search of finding new and exciting ways to pull the audience into its crazy, often darkly comedic story.
The filmmaker pushes his aesthetic early on as he introduces us to Hank as an already anxious figure with a troubled past he'd like to leave behind, and is numbing through an excessive use of alcohol. The life he once had as a promising baseball player was shattered when he was involved in a car accident that killed his best friend, Dale (D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai). As a result, Hank still carries the guilt from that day as it (literally) flashes back in rapid succession every time he closes his eyes.
Stuck in a perpetual rut of mediocrity, he is tasked with watching his neighbor Russ' (Matt Smith) cat while he is away. However, what Hank doesn't know is that a group of Russian mobsters (played by Yuri Kolokolnikov & Nikita Kukushkin), their Puerto Rican associate (Benito A. Martinez Ocasio), a police detective (Regina King), and two Hassidic brothers (Vincent D’Onofrio & Liev Schreiber) are looking for Russ and a key that he has hidden in a place no one (and I genuinely mean no one) will find.
Because Russ can't be found, the baddies take Hank as their fall guy and order him to show them where the money is. Hank now gets stuck in a situation he isn’t responsible for and has to clean up a mess that he doesn’t know how to repair, because none of it is his fault. He was simply at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and everything rapidly spiraled out of control from there.
What follows is a shockingly violent anxiety attack that never lets up, even when things (apparently) calm down. It feels all over the place, but the controlled chaos of Aronofsky's movie is consistently engaging, and it moves at a pace that few filmmakers can actively sustain. Not even Guy Ritchie, whose last couple of films and TV series showed him in a more meandering, contemplative state, could ever come up with such a rapid pace at his prime.
Anxiety has never been this exhilarating
There's an art to anxiety cinema that hasn't been perfected like this in a while. Yet, Aronofsky expertly stages a succession of sequences where characters stressfully talk over each other imperceptibly, as misunderstandings beget more misunderstandings, and create more unnecessary bloodshed. Aronofsky expertly stages a succession of sequences where characters stressfully talk over each other imperceptibly, as misunderstandings beget more misunderstandings, and create more unnecessary bloodshed.
It’s frequently loud and extremely dissatisfying for anyone looking to have a tangible emotional connection with the people around Hank, such as his girlfriend Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz), or anyone he works for. Since most of the characters are trigger-happy and like to precisely inflict pain on their victims before asking any questions, many of the figures introduced in the picture could be disposed of at any moment, which creates a factor of unpredictability that’s simultaneously shocking and highly comedic.
The constant mayhem of its loudest sequences and relentless carnage ensure we’re always glued to the screen at every occasion, even when Aronofsky bathes in excessive, almost cartoonish violence, as one character clumsily operates a gun, which propels us in many finely-choregraphed action that recall the precision of a Lau Kar-leung or Corey Yuen, though in a less refined mode of storytelling.
I’ve not seen Aronofsky craft action before, apart from the large-scale flood in 2014’s Noah, so it came as a surprise to me to see him so attuned to what modern action filmmaking should aspire to be, especially in the mainstream level. If anything, Caught Stealing proves how much of an eye he has for bare-knuckled one-on-one fights, and cathartic shootouts, with each unique sequence having a different effect on the viewer.
Some are more playful and morbidly funny, while others are nasty and purposefully devoid of any fun. Still, all of them are thrillingly captured by Matthew Libatique (his second New York-set film this year after Spike Lee's Highest 2 Lowest), and cut with a note-perfect sense of timing and rhythm by Andrew Weisblum. The rhythm constantly changes as the story takes a thousand different directions in its fast 107-minute runtime, and the editing is always in service of Aronofsky’s storytelling needs.
When it (slightly) slows down and sits with Hank, we begin to connect more to him on a deeper level and actively feel for his plight when the anxiety is cranked up and he is caught in the middle of a situation he desperately wants to get out of, yet only crawls a deeper hole for himself and others around him.
If there's something tangible to grasp out of Caught Stealing, then it’s the inextricable leading man star power of Austin Butler. If you weren’t convinced of his talents with Elvis or Dune: Part Two, you will be when you see him in Aronofsky’s film, even if you end up disliking what the filmmaker proposes. It’s certainly a big ask, and one that’s bound to provoke intense reactions one way or another. However, Butler’s commanding presence on the screen cannot be denied. His sense of timing is impeccable, and how he paints the character with such emotional complexity is so riveting to watch.
Hank’s life isn’t easy, and the event is certainly making everything for him even harder. But when he's eventually on the other side of it, perhaps he’ll be able to sit back and have time to ponder what his newfound purpose should be. When that happens, he will never be the same again...