Caught Stealing

As much as I love Black Swan, Requiem For a Dream and The Wrestler, there is no getting away from the fact that Darren Aronofsky has repeatedly told us all that he hates us through several films, stories and dramaturgical tricks and manoeuvres. His rarely very shy distaste for humanity and its dark sides has been openly and crudely criticised, exposed and portrayed in a way that often created a difficult-to-define uneasy feeling of inadequacy in me as a viewer. When in Noah and Mother he also gave both one and 2000 boots to collective beliefs and religion's power over man, I felt for myself that we would never see a film with a slightly less depressing message from the extremely talented Aronofsky. But I was wrong. There's a pulpy, slightly crude and funny entertainer there underneath the hard surface and Darren, via this adaptation of Charlie Huston's acclaimed book, has made his most light-hearted film yet.

Caught Stealing is not a popcorn film. It's not exactly Marky Mark and The Rock who, through unfortunate circumstances, gets into trouble with triple mafia representatives. It isn't. Darren still knows how to build creepiness and create characters with depth, nuance and that tortured, dark vulnerability that makes The Wrestler in particular so incredibly good. The story takes place in Brooklyn, New York. The year is 1998 and we follow young Hank, a substitute bartender who, two years earlier, doomed his meteoric career as a baseball star by drunkenly driving a Pontiac into a telephone pole. Hank suffers the demons of the accident, drowning its effect on his sanity in booze and beer and hoping that one day his beloved San Francisco Giants will make it to the finals of the MLB World Series. At his side is his girlfriend Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz), desperately trying to get him to stop drinking, stop agonising over 'what might have been' and try to live in the present, all while his next-door neighbour and new friend Russ deals drugs in volumes that would make Escobar himself sweat with envy.

Hank, however, knows nothing about Russ's business and so naively agrees to look after his cat while he travels home to London to attend his father's funeral. Something he should never have done, of course, as both the Jewish Mafia and the Russian Mafia are after large sums of hidden drug money that Russ has got his hands on, and hidden. When everyone finds out that it is Hank who has the key to Russ's cat shit-embossed apartment and thus the key to the money stash, a cat-and-mouse game of disproportionate proportion begins where the pressured Hank must now use all his cunning to escape with his life.

As expected, and as in the book, Darren Aronofsky lets New York act as a third character here, choosing to expose its grisly underbelly rather than build that tiresomely romanticised image of the city that we saw in Spike Lee's latest drama fiasco, among others. The Brooklyn of 1998 is here run-down, dirty, noisy, messy and crammed with characters and people who are morally corrupt and mostly drunk. Aronofsky paints with a broader brush than he usually does dramatically, and he allows the violence in Caught Stealing to retain a sort of lighter, gentler tone than I would have expected, although there are some graphic scenes involving plenty of blood and outright mob executions. It's noticeable in that as a director he's not used to filming gunfights and although his chase scenes, on foot and by car, through New York offer plenty of thrills, pace and great editing, there are parts of this film that feel comical in their violence, but are intended to leave an impression and affect me as a viewer on a deeper level. In particular, a story twist at the end of the first act feels structurally out of place but also emotionally strange as the build-up lacks emotional weight. The result of this twist affects the entire film's story but never feels either as gripping or narratively tangible until the scenes that follow when I, as an audience member, am somewhat manipulated, which is perhaps the worst part of Caught Stealing.

That said, Caught Stealing is a good film. It's a fast, dirty, raw, exciting, dense and fun thriller that we need a lot more of in today's film climate. Aronofsky mixes True Romance with Uncut Gems and offers a pace that's hard not to love. It doesn't stand a chance against The Wrestler and Black Swan in terms of his best moments, but it's still sharper than both Noah and The Whale and a thriller you don't want to miss.