On the same day I saw Darren Aronofsky’s Caught Stealing, I also saw Spike Lee’s latest film, Highest 2 Lowest. The two disappointing films, both from extremely talented directors, actually have a striking amount of other similarities. Matthew Libatique was the director of photography on both films, they are both portraits of New York City (although one clearly roots for the Yankees and the other clearly roots for the Mets), they both attempt to combine comedy, strong violence, and dramatic elements, and neither of them fully succeed at any of these things. Caught Stealing is much less of a mess than Highest 2 Lowest from an editing perspective, but Aronofsky’s film is more poorly judged in a tonal sense. Both films are also adaptations of other work, neither of them written by their respective directors. I feel like that’s the biggest issue with both. Brilliant individual sequences are drowned out by either a lack of solid dialogue, solid plotting, or both.
Caught Stealing stars Austin Butler as Hank Thompson, a wayward bartender from a small town in California trying to make his way in New York City in 1998. His friend-with-benefits Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz) tells him he’s running away from his own life, and that’s absolutely true. In high school, Hank had dreams of playing baseball for his beloved San Francisco Giants, until a horrific car crash which injured him and killed one of his teammates. Now an agreeable, drifting alcoholic, his and Yvonne’s red-hot chemistry seems to be the only positive thing in his life, even if they’re not officially boyfriend and girlfriend. One day, Hank is violently woken up from his stagnation by two thugs associated with his neighbor Russ (Matt Smith), a British punk who’s left for his father’s funeral. Hank tells the thugs that Russ isn’t home, but that doesn’t seem to make much of a difference. This scene is our first inkling of how violent this film will get, and how poorly it weaves in the darkly comedic tone it’s clearly going for.
From this point on, the film is essentially an hour and a half of Hank, a guy who’s troubled but completely innocent, get kicked around, tortured, and stomped on, both physically and emotionally. I definitely have a lower tolerance for this kind of story than many other viewers, and so I found it hard to laugh when the film wanted me to. Thus, the punctuation of punchlines regularly had little to no effect on me, and the film became a grungy, almost mean-spirited soup of bad feeling. Other cast members add decent flavor to the soup, — Regina King as a corrupt detective and Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio (a.k.a. Bad Bunny) as a quirky criminal among them — but they can’t save the film from itself. By the time we arrive at the climax, it’s hard to ignore how many coincidences and only-in-the-movies moments have happened to get us to the ending.
Ultimately, Caught Stealing is a case of style over substance. There are plenty of movies with that issue which I still love, but the style has to be fun and enjoyable in some way. This story is just so sad that its quirkiness doesn’t come across. Hank may have “stolen” a key which unlocks a safe, but someone definitely stole this film’s balance. | George Napper
