RIOTUS

I never thought I’d see the day when I would be laughing and enjoying with delight during a film by Darren Aronofsky. This is a director who I believe is one of the best of all time, yet I never want to watch one of his films for a second time because they are so depressing at showing the darker side of life that it etches the darkness on my mind, and I never forget a frame afterward. Requiem for a Dream, for me, feels like a snuff film, and I talk about it as such, no matter how amazing it is. I fear that film like the boogie man at night under my bed. Black Swan is somehow more depressing than Perfect Blue. I could go on, but that will just belabor the point.

Yet with Caught Stealing, a reference to baseball is about a man named Hank Thompson (Austin Butler), living in the Lower East Side of New York City in 1998. His life is thrown upside down when his neighbor, Russ (Matt Smith), leaves town to see his sick father in London and asks him to watch his cat. Unbeknownst to Hank, a bartender who has a bit of a drinking problem, in now involved in a deep web of criminals who are looking for the hidden money Russ has, and they are willing to do everything and anything to get their hands on it, much to the suffering of Hank.

Austin Butler gets a good vehicle to shine here as Hank, a man who loves the San Francisco Giants and is constantly running away from his past and the event that cost him his potential career in the Major Leagues. In many ways, this film is a coming-of-age story for a man in his late 20s/early 30s, in that, in this extreme situation, he has to come to terms with owning his choices in life and his irresponsibility. Butler is just so easy to feel for in this film. It’s like a version of the The Man Who Knew Too Little, but with the most extreme outcome. Everything bad happens to this man for precisely no reason. Aronofsky makes it not utterly depressing with his camera movement and how he focuses on Butler in a scene. It pauses at just the right points and focuses on things you wouldn’t expect, which helps bring out humor in the scenes that Butler sells.

Butler has excellent chemistry with Zoë Kravitz as Hank’s EMT girlfriend, Yvonne. I love her performance, it is just oozing with her unmatched cool charisma, but a deep caring for the basically man-child Hank. Her character does fall into a trope that will bother many, and it did for me for a bit, but I think this film goes in a place where no character comes out of this story unscathed. Yet this could be due to a “racial blind” casting, which doesn’t help because it goes into what happens to female love interests in films of the course of cinematic history, but she is Black, and then we put that on top of it, and it can make you feel a bit icky. All that to say, Kravitz is amazing, and I wish I had seen her a bit more.

Now, Regina King as Detective Roman is pure delight. She plays a Detective you’ve seen in plenty of films before, the tired Detective who is a bit too cynical, as well as being completely, utterly New York. You can see King is having fun with this character, and the character is something we’ve gotten to see men play almost too much, and seeing her in this role helps with the earlier issue I was talking about with Kravitz’s character. King elevates the scenes she’s in every time she’s on screen.

Bad Bunny (Benito A Martínez Ocasio) has some great presence when we see him in the film. Better than the little cameo he had in Bullet Train a few years ago. Here, he gets to act and be a real character. I hope I get to see him do more roles in the future. Vincent D’Onofrio and Liev Schreiber are a funny menace in the film; while not on screen a lot, they both work well together. There are a lot of great performances throughout.

The attention to detail with the production design makes a believable recreation of 1998 LES NYC, with the phones and the cars and the recreation of storefronts that aren’t there anymore. While New York has changed, it hasn’t changed that much that it can’t be turned back a bit. The film looks beautiful thanks to the work of cinematographer Matthew Libatique, and the needle drops grab at the nostalgia of those times so easily.

Matt Smith is so different from this punk Russ that you’d forget he was the Fez-wearing Doctor Who at one time. He does steal the scenes he’s in for the very little time he’s in the movie, yet he is the inciting incident of it all. My growing old person nostalgia for late 90s/early 2000s NYC, as that’s when I went to college there, along with this film not utterly destroying my psyche in a great crime story, made this an easy recommendation for the late summer/early autumn film to see. Caught Stealing was a great theater experience to watch with other people, and it is worth it in this dry movie season we are in currently. So go see Caught Stealing and be shocked by actually enjoying a Darren Aronofsky film.