Caught Stealing: A Fun and Moody Modern Noir

Darren Aronofsky's Caught Stealing is a movie about a bartender living in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a bartender named Hank with a past that comes back to torture him when he falls asleep. If only I hadn't been drinking that night. If only my then-uninjured had gone on to play baseball. If only my friend hadn't died in that car crash of my making. Hank's life situation can be pretty dour, but don't let that fool you into thinking this movie isn't at all fun. Shot by cinematographer Matthew Libatique (Requiem for a Dream) in such a way that the personality of the sleazier parts of this city pops, it's a familiar story about a man who's found himself on the wrong side of organized crime, a story told with such charisma and efficiency that it manages to take a scenario as upsetting as having those you love targeted by criminals and turn it into a genuinely funny comedy.

Hank Thompson, a rough-and-tumble bartender played brilliantly by Austin Butler, is a magnetic character with a tragic past who's contrasted perfectly by his girlfriend, the darkly sensual Yvonne. But you can count on the sleazy city to always do its best to break up anything good, and before long, the Russian mob and Hank get off on the wrong foot. Throw in some corrupt cops, a couple of killer Jews (you read that right), and a few baseball bats, and you've got a crime noir with both an evident reverence for classic gangster movies and an unmistakably modern edge. The tone of this movie is beautifully grimy, leaning heavily into the shadowy and sleazy areas of New York to find striking color in the darkness. The color grading of Caught Stealing is absolutely phenomenal, surely some of the best I've seen all year. It runs the risk of being too colorful, but finds the sweet spot where it maintains the sleaze while also managing to be startlingly vivid, much like a bright neon sign on a dark and dangerous street.

Austin Butler and Zoe Kravitz look and feel right at home here, with Kravitz rediscovering that familiar and mysteriously seductive edge she portrayed so well as Catwoman in The Batman, another neo-noir that doesn't look and feel too unlike this movie. As for Butler's Hank, the true focus of Caught Stealing, he's a former baseball player who has fallen on hard times, the dire misfortune of getting mixed up with the local mob notwithstanding. Naturally, his friends don't take to this with a straight face. It doesn't take a lot of panicked decisions by those close to him to throw Hank's already precarious life situation into absolute pandemonium, not that it wasn't already there, and he wasn't just denying it.

You see, Hank isn't the type to do much to change his life situation, not because he's lazy, but rather because he's just accepted that he's a guy with absolutely horrible luck. He's also almost too pure for these mean streets, the type of guy to call his mama whenever things go wrong. He bears a striking contrast to the dirty world around him with his inability to be anything other than really emotionally pure. Many of the aspects of Hank's character are played for laughs just as much as the intentionally funny editing of this movie, yet Caught Stealing never seems to look down on him: you'll feel for the guy. Both he and the editing that does his character a lot of favors shine among the grime. The editing in this movie is some of the best I've seen this year, so minimalistic that it can sometimes hit comedic beats. My favorite instance of this is a jump cut from Hank hurtling towards a light pole in his car to Hank waking up with a start in a hospital bed. This movie is more humor-aligned than I am, and take it from me - this particular visual gag is a lot funnier than I make it sound here. Aronofsky makes his movie move with an efficiency, an urgent efficiency that extends well beyond its editing.

Caught Stealing is remarkably in tune with the realization that it will be critiqued and analyzed, often by people who have watched enough movies to write off any and all potential self-indulgence on its part. Its story is cut down to extreme minimalist exaction, proving to me that Aronofsky knows not only what he wants to say but also precisely how he wants to say it. In many ways, this is a movie that deserved to be even longer than it actually was, but everyone involved resists the urge to indulge even its most impressive tendencies in a remarkable feat of self-control. Still, the quick and slick editing veers a bit off the rails as the movie progresses, causing Caught Stealing to lean in the opposite direction, and toward a different extreme. It can become chaotic with time, and the plot is made up of so many disparate parts that it can even begin to feel a bit hasty, like it's trying to include every single idea brought up in the writer's room without considering the possibility that some of them should be thrown out. It plays its hand with an undeniable efficiency, but its hand is so extremely overcomplicated that you feel the strain, nonetheless.

Still, I have to applaud it for its best attempts to remain surprising, even as its screenplay sometimes demands too much of it. Caught Stealing can be remarkably subtle. There is one big reveal towards the end of this movie that is every bit as restrained and nuanced as it is shocking, one that took me back to some of the twisty, turny crime thrillers of days past. Aronofsky's work is more of a homage to these types of movies than it is a direct reinvention of them, but it's played with both such evident reverence for them and yet such obvious desire to carve out its own path that it ends up feeling both nostalgic and newfangled at the same time, somehow. It performs all of the tricks of these old crime thrillers with unmistakable skill while also putting its own exciting spin on them.

This movie works because its idea of getting fancy is going back to the bare basics and reinterpreting them, rather than needlessly complicating itself with new odds and ends unceremoniously tacked on. It doesn't break with tradition, but it does a really good job of reminding us why the tradition has grown so close to our hearts over the years. And if we keep getting crime thrillers working at a pace this prompt, I don't see it growing distant anytime soon.

Caught Stealing - 9/10

Galatians 6:7-8