If you had told me last year that Darren Aronofsky the celluloid high priest of psychological torment, chronicler of dancers, addicts, and whales perpetually spiraling into their own obsessions, would stage a Guy Ritchie caper comedy, “with a cat,” I’d have assumed you’d been drinking what the denizens of Paul’s Bar are serving. Yet here is Caught Stealing, a film so unrecognizable as Aronofsky’s that your main clue to his involvement is the perverse glee with which the violence arrives not with the velvet caress of fate, but like a sledgehammer wrapped in Pop Rocks.
The premise is almost parodic in its everyman-mangler enthusiasm: Austin Butler, post-Elvis but pre-deification, is Hank, an ex-baseball hopeful now marinating in alcohol and regret, whose greatest coup in life is being in the wrong place at exactly the wrong time, stringing together a murder-mad comedy of errors so catastrophic you half expect him to trip over the corpse of Wile E. Coyote. Yes, there’s a cat at the center of it all, a feline MacGuffin who survives more disaster than its weary, soon-to-be-kidneyless pet-sitter. (Cat fanciers may find in this film their own little Homeward Bound, though I confess my sympathies run more canine.)
It’s all held together or, more accurately, kept leaping from one calamity to the next by Butler, who, for once, isn’t asked to sweat public mythos but to play something astonishingly close to an actual person. If normalcy is a stretch for Hollywood, Butler wears it like a borrowed suit: he’s hapless, battered, occasionally winning, and moves through the movie with a kind of stoned resilience, as if his brain, too, were stuck on one of Aronofsky’s infamous fever loops. Around him swirl an army of heavies and weirdos, Matt Smith, borrowing punk infernal energy where possible; Liev Schreiber and Vincent D’Onofrio, drawing out those big comic-book villain faces with relish and Zoë Kravitz, who, in a sex scene as hot as the script will allow, is given a role that vanishes into the plot like a popped bubble. If anyone manages to carve out a memorable silhouette, it’s Smith and Schreiber; they know this genre is about the barnacles, not the barnacles’ back stories.
But “plot” here is the stick on which Caught Stealing keeps beating itself: the film is a parade of reversals so predictably unpredictable you begin to play a game of “spot the next body bag.” From the first killing, you know the film’s bloodlust is not there for shock, it’s the mechanics of farce, but with better squibs. There isn’t much carriage for emotional investment; Kravitz’s Yvonne barely escapes the usual “great girlfriend, tragic plot device” ash heap, but even as the bodies pile up and Hank accumulates more injuries than an NFL linebacker, there’s no sense of escalation, just a deranged comic inertia. Character development is strictly forbidden, Butler’s traumatic baseball flashbacks, played ad infinitum, are so repetitive they could be chopped into GIFs for the trauma-pronounced.
And yet, bewilderingly, I wasn’t bored. Aronofsky, liberated from his own myth-making, stages the action with more relish than depth, borrowing Guy Ritchie’s larkish energy but never his sense of rhythm or economy. There’s art here, but it’s the art of the carnival barker rather than the ringmaster: “Step right up! Watch the unluckiest bastard in New York lose his kidney, his girl, and his dignity!” The one-liners ping (enough), the violence sometimes stings, and at its best, the movie slips into that rare sense of anything goes abandon, a director goofing off in the major leagues. This is the first Aronofsky film you could watch at midnight with friends and a tub of wings, and that is, at least, a novelty.
But what of substance? Of catharsis? Caught Stealing is almost proud to leave you with nothing but the buzzing aftertaste of entertainment. Every would-be twist lands, not with the shock of revelation, but the dull thud of expectation. By the end, as Hank emerges battered and inexplicably solvent (the American dream!), scampering off to Tulum with a suit of borrowed identities and a fistful of cash, you realize you’ve just eaten a whole bag of chips and somehow still feel a little hungry.
So, no: Aronofsky has not scaled the haunted heights of Black Swan. He hasn’t upended the genre, or reinvented the caper film, he’s just tried it on for size and found, perhaps, it fits him like yesterday’s party hat: silly, disposable, and, if you’re still awake at 2 a.m., not altogether without charm. I had fun, sure, I just can’t remember quite why. Maybe it was the cat. Or maybe it was the sweet relief of watching an artist let his hair down and roll in the lowbrow mud.
If Caught Stealing is a crime, it’s a victimless one, except, perhaps, the notion that a movie this mechanical can ever truly steal your heart.
