A comic, karmic crime heist in the ‘Pulp Fiction’ mold
In most heist dramas since Pulp Fiction, murderous criminals are comically stupid, and the lead characters are often mentally missing a beat as well, or at least they’re quirky as hell. It’s a postmodern staple, and many more A-list action thrillers are swinging for those Pulp Fiction fences right now. Whether it’s Brad Pitt in Bullet Train, Brad (again) with George Clooney in the abysmal Wolfs, Anora’s dumb-as-bricks Russian mafia, P.T. Anderson’s THC-incapicitated P.I. in Inherent Vice, or Shane Black’s The Good Guys, it’s all about that twisty, neon-soaked vibe highlighting people with dim-watt bulbs for brains.
Miss the ‘90s? Darren Aronofsky takes a crack at that decade’s dumb-ass crime thrillers, with a smart screenplay based on Charlie Houston’s novel. In Caught Stealing, we meet Hank Thompson, played by all-American Austin Butler: a guy with shattered college baseball dreams, yet living and working happily enough as a bartender in New York’s Lower East Side, circa 1998, when Rudy Giuliani was experiencing the upward trajectory of his public career (the Twin Towers still appear in several background shots).
Hank’s got a cool paramedic girlfriend (Zoë Kravitz), and things would be fine as rain if his punk Mohawk neighbor Russ (Matt Smith) didn’t suddenly leave him in charge of his cat while he scoots off to visit an ailing dad in the UK.
Then things quickly spiral out of control. East European goons (stereotypical, even for 1998) take up residence in Hank’s hallway, demanding to know when Russ will return. Hank takes a beating, and it’s key here that our all-American boy rarely throws a punch back, preferring to run away from a fight whenever possible. After his liver is ruptured, and he’s told to stop drinking forever, his escape instincts kick in: He backslides, until Zoë, who loves him, insists he needs to be “able to take care of your own sh*t.”
Most of Caught Stealing is about a guy who knows too little, always stumble-bumming into worse and worse predicaments, and in that way alone, it’s a wee bit better than most blatant Pulp Fiction knockoffs.
Oh, there are the usual bevy of oddballs—cooler-than-cool girlfriends, murderous Orthodox Jews, dead-eyed black female detectives, Russian mobsters named Microbe—but it offers up a bit of character study along the way.
You want Hank to get better, or at least wiser. He’s invested enough, at least, to take care of a neighbor’s cat, so he can’t be all bad. He loves his girlfriend (though Zoë isn’t given much to do here except cheer him on). Unfortunately, people keep getting killed in Hank’s vicinity, and it’s not entirely not his fault.
Caught Stealing is a short-ish wild ride (under two hours), yet it packs in quite a bit of horrific violence, also a tip o’ the cap to Pulp Fiction, which was a future roadmap for how to play with narrative, introduce character-driven pop culture dialogue whenever possible, and explode with sudden blood-spray as needed. Aronofsky’s direction is unlike any of his previous films, going for a lighter touch despite the violence and gore. The look is neon-romantic scuzz. Near as I can tell, he has been hoovering up late-’80s/early-’90s Scorsese, by way of After Hours (come to think of it, that is Griffin Dunne playing a hippie bar owner in the Lower East Side).
Hank, for his part, always plays at a disadvantage (not unlike Dunne’s hapless character in After Hours). Despite having a baseball bat at the ready for would-be burglars, Hank seems loath to swing it much. Not surprisingly, his Elvis-like puss sports a lot of bruises by the end of the film. He’s not exactly a pacifist, but somehow aware on an inner nervy level of the karmic ripples and repercussions of violence.
For another thing, he roots for the underdog Giants, in a town of Yankees and Mets fans. (There are baseball gags here that will sail over local audience heads like a three-run blast to right field.)
But even that innocent dream of baseball has to get reevaluated in Caught Stealing as, by the end, Hank finds himself turning off the TV game and staring out at the ocean waves instead. Perhaps contemplating the ripples.
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Caught Stealing opens Sept. 10 in cinemas through Columbia Pictures.
