I’ve Been (To) ‘Caught Stealing’

The results are never less than fascinating (no matter the payoff) when a true auteur decides to make their version of a straightforward, mainstream(ish) movie. At the high end, there’s Spike Lee’s delectable heist flick Inside Man, where all of the director’s eccentricities meld with the material to create a stew that gets to have it both ways—arty and entertaining. Then there’s the mid-level outcome, such as Scorsese’s Bringing Out The Dead, which is admirable even if it doesn’t all come together. The basement looks like Chloe Zhao’s The Eternals, where the marriage of her sensibilities to the Marvel Universe was a bold, but ultimately failed attempt. 

So, where does Darren Aronofsky’s Caught Stealing land on the scale? I would position it slightly above Bringing Out The Dead, and notably below Inside Man. What is true of all four of the films that I’ve mentioned is an auteur is gonna auteur. They simply can’t help themselves. 

Such is definitely the case with Caught Stealing, a movie that has been promoted as a comedic crime story that is far more grim (and only sporadically funny) than Sony Pictures might want you to believe. At a high level, Caught Stealing is a caper film about a bartender (Austin Butler) at a hole-in-the-wall in New York City, who begrudgingly agrees to watch his neighbor’s cat, and ends up in possession of a key that leads to a huge sack of cash. Cash that a police officer (Regina King), the Russian mob, and two Hasidic gangsters (Liev Schreiber and Vincent D’Onofrio) badly want to get their hands on. 

This unholy triumvirate surrounds Butler’s Hank Thompson, who wants nothing more than to tend bar, drink beer, and hook up with his kinda/sorta girlfriend Yvonne (a no-nonsense Zoe Kravitz). Hank has ghosts that haunt him in his sleep. He was once a high school baseball phenom who was positioned to be drafted in the first round by a Major League team, but a tragic accident left him with a shattered knee and shattered dreams. The last thing Hank wants is to be caught up in someone else’s bad business, but with a cat came a key, and what happens with that key is integral to the safety of Hank and all those around him. 

For the first forty minutes or so, Aronofsky seems to be willing to play the caper-flick game (albeit with more than a little eccentricity), but when the murder of someone close to Hank occurs, the director of Pi, Requiem For A Dream, Black Swan, The Wrestler, and The Whale can’t resist mining the darker territory that he’s used to. Caught Stealing becomes progressively more grim after that death, and then the semi-comedic asides (like Thompson’s constant concern for the San Francisco Giants’ playoff chances) often play off-kilter to the heavier story at hand.

Over the course of the film’s 107-minute run time, Hank takes a brutal beating, has major surgery, and is under constant threat of death to himself and those he cares about. Caught Stealing often feels like a film that Tony Scott (RIP) would have been better suited to direct. The film is totally inconsistent, to say the least. Even the needle drops in the film (which range from The Scorpions and Neil Sedaka to David Bowie and The Buzzcocks) speak to a certain schizophrenia. 

Even so, there is much to admire on screen. I was immensely put off by Austin Butler’s blank-faced, doe-eyed breakthrough as Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis three years ago. Since that bizarre rendering of the “king of rock and roll,” Butler has excelled in ensemble roles in Masters of the Air and The Bikeriders. Now, in Caught Stealing, he proves that he can carry a film all by himself, even if the movie is more than a little ungainly in its execution. Austin Butler is a movie star. 

Aronofsky’s steady DP Matthew Libatique captures the grunge and grime of 1998 NYC brilliantly. The supporting cast is full of pros (including a cameo of an Oscar-winner during the film’s close) who add value at every turn. Matt Smith, who plays the neighbor who foists the cat onto Thompson, is in the mode of a British punk-rocker, complete with Mohawk and torn-sleeved t-shirt. I’m willing to bet that fans of Doctor Who have never seen this version of Smith, and he’s terrific as the sketchy friend across the hall.

And then there is the cat. A creature that Thompson initially has no use for, but who soon becomes the tether to his reluctant pet-sitter’s sense of decency and desire to control at least one thing in his life. “Bud” is a mean-spirited Maine Coon (I’ve had one before, and the behavior tracks) that can only tolerate his rightful owner, Thompson, and Kravitz’s Yvonne (after all, she was once a Catwoman), and practically no one else. The lengths that Thompson goes to keep the feline safe may stretch credulity on paper, but not in practice. The last time I can remember major characters going so out of their way for a cat dates back to Key and Peele’s underrated crime comedy, Keanu. The cat is symbolic of Hank’s good heart and soul. If he can just keep the cat from meeting its demise, he will have done one thing he can be proud of. 

As you might have gathered by now, Caught Stealing is one unusual wide-release film. Based on a book by its screenwriter, Charlie Huston, the movie is successful only in fits and starts. I don’t think it is too strong to call the film an honorable failure, but as such, it is paradoxically more interesting than many films that aim lower and hit the mark. Caught Stealing is likely to end up as a curio in Aronofsky’s cinematic cabinet—the kind of film a major director makes to keep their tools sharp while waiting for their next muse to arrive. 

At the same time, I suspect that Caught Stealing may well become a cult film that ages well. It’s entirely possible that getting on Aronofsky’s cinematic wavelength is going to take some time and some revisits before it’s fully grasped. For now, it’s an eminently watchable headscratcher. During the theatrical dog days of late August/Early September, you could do far worse.