The new Darren Aronofsky movie Caught Stealing takes place over the course of a few days in the early fall of 1998. It might be a stretch to call this movie a full-circle moment for Aronofsky, considering that this New York crime movie with comic overtones and a recovery plotline isn’t especially like anything the director has made before. Yet there is some temporal poignancy accompanying the realization that the movie is, technically speaking, set during the release of Aronofsky’s first feature Pi, which was likely still playing somewhere in Manhattan in September 1998. The movie itself echoes through certain elements of Caught Stealing: Hank (Austin Butler) lives on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, not far from Chinatown, where the oddball mathematician Max Cohen (Sean Gullette) made his home; Hank’s paramedic girlfriend Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz) lives in Chinatown, too. Among the people after Hank in Caught Stealing is a pair of armed Hasidic Jews; Hasidim also menace Max at one point in Pi, albeit without machine guns.
Is Aronofsky returning to his roots? Superficially, not really; unlike the black-and-white, independently financed Pi, Caught Stealing is a Sony production featuring half a dozen recognizable stars and will be far more scrutable to mainstream audiences, in that it does not involve a mystical 216-digit number that may or may not represent God. But depending on how you look at it, Aronofsky has been reclaiming different aspects of his roots for nearly a decade now. Mother!, his audience-confounding Biblical allegory starring Jennifer Lawrence, may have a global superstar at its center but feels true to the experimental values of Pi. The Whale, his stage-to-screen adaptation that won an Oscar for Brendan Fraser’s performance, was even smaller in scale and more tuned in to the addiction and bodily suffering of Requiem for a Dream, his Pi follow-up. And now Caught Stealing returns to him to the same general geographic and chronological vicinity of Pi and Requiem, a Giuliani-era mid-gentrification New York.
Is Aronofsky still retreating from the heft of expectations that accompanied his brief stint as a director of $100 million movies? His Black Swan – which, like The Whale, won an Oscar for its leading performer – came out during a brief window where the upstart auteurs of the late ’90s seemed to be making the transition from dorm-room-poster-level appreciation to actual mainstream hits. Between 2009 and 2014, directors like Aronofsky, Spike Jonze, David O. Russell, Alexander Payne, Wes Anderson, and Michel Gondry (in addition to the more commercially established David Fincher, Quentin Tarantino, and Coen Brothers) all had one or more movies that made $100 million or more at the worldwide box office, sometimes much more. One of those hits arguably helped auger the beginning of the end of these unexpected glory days, and it was Aronofsky’s Noah, a Biblical epic that made $350 million worldwide – the most of any of this era’s auteur-driven hits while, back to those roots again, seemingly alienating a good portion of its audience.
Noah is an interesting movie, which I went into last year when it unexpectedly stormed the Netflix charts. In retrospect, it may have been a more productive and unexpected evolution of Aronofsky’s talent than the movies he’s made since, though mother! and Caught Stealing both have plenty of merit. (The Whale, well, we all love Brendan Fraser, and Hong Chau is very good in it, too.) If Noah felt like a big swing toward left field that only Aronofsky could have made in that particular way, Caught Stealing almost comes across like an alternate history; it’s a movie that seems like something he might have made, if his career had zig-zagged in a different direction at some point around 25 years ago.
In terms of pure technique, it’s solid; still collaborating with cinematographer Matthew Libatique, who has shot all of Aronofsky’s films except The Wrestler (as well as many for Spike Lee, including his new Highest 2 Lowest), Aronofsky zips through the New York City streets with an energy that’s less aggressively manic than his early films, and less reliant on show-offy close-ups, fast cuts, and so on. Perhaps because he’s had increased access to movie stars over the years (four of his movies have had leading performances nominated for Oscars, and two have won), he seems to trust his actors more now than he did 20 years ago. In Austin Butler he has a lead with full-wattage charisma, even (or especially) playing a washed-out high school ballplayer making his living as a New York bartender.
Butler’s Hank is also a functioning alcoholic; he’s not an abusive wreck, and he’s clearly been able to hold down both a job and an apartment in the city, no easy task even when you’re stone-cold sober. But he also clearly drinks to numb his haunted pain over the teenage accident that lost him his baseball career and more. The movie then proceeds to deny him that outlet when a savage beating from criminals looking for his next-door neighbor leaves him more or less forced to quit drinking – or at least, that would be the smart thing to do. This complication allows Aronofsky to stitch together two narratives. One is the physical recovery of Hank post-surgery, as the criminal plot continues to threaten his well-being; it’s somewhat less agonizing than the soft body horror of Requiem, The Wrestler, or Black Swan, but still wince-inducing. The second narrative sometimes gets shoved aside for the flashier criminal violence – but at its best, Caught Stealing is a recovery story about a guy who needs to find another way of living besides bartending shifts and breakfast beers.
That’s what sets Caught Stealing apart from the drug-ravaged Requiem, which follows a series of concurrent downward spirals, and essentially ends with a symphony of rock-bottom crashes. Of course, that movie is (mostly) about heroin, a more addictive and dangerous substance than alcohol. And Caught Stealing can’t always stick to its regimen; some of it resembles a post-Tarantino crime caper, while the mix of New York locations, a literally scarred-and-stitched lead, and some excessively grim turns recall, well, pretty much every Aronofsky movie with the possible exception of Noah. It would be easy enough to describe this as an Aronofsky thing retrofitted for wide-release consumption – now with an actual sense of humor! – and indeed, it’s going out into theaters like a Labor Day programmer for Butler’s growing fanbase.
But if this is Aronofsky’s attempt to recapture the commercial juice he briefly enjoyed, well, maybe that’s the common ground with Noah: a movie that looks like it inhabits a familiar genre but is just idiosyncratically “off” enough to still alienate some viewers. If this is intended as a recovery movie, the false starts and hairpin turns into nightmare territory make more sense than as part of a stylized crime picture (which it also is, but in an uneven, jittery sort of way). I’m not suggesting Aronofsky needed to recover from the off-key melodrama of The Whale, which did win an Oscar, after all. Caught Stealing isn’t as literally soul-searching as The Fountain, still one of Aronofsky’s most underappreciated films (and his first, doomed attempt at mainstream crossover success). But the new movie is most effective when it feels like a filmmaker taking stock of what he’s done, and re-figuring out how to leave his mark on a very different world.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.