When Hank agrees to look after his neighbour's cat in their Manhattan apartment block he quickly finds out how much trouble that has landed him when a pair of Russian mafia thugs beat him unto death's door and reveal a whole mini cosmos of bad behind them. Hank coulda been a baseball player, he is haunted by nightmares of why that didn't happen. Where others might feel like a failure, he reasons that he likes his job at the bar and loves his girlfriend and has pretty much what he needs. He doesn't want what the bad guys want but they have their ways and he's bargaining over riches he isn't pursuing as the stakes get deadly and real. Maybe he should just given the cat some of the tuna from his bagle and gone to the shop, but circumstances won't have that. It's 1998, before the whole world went off. At least there's trip hop on the radio.
After Black Swan, Noah, Mother, and The Whale, Darren Aranofsky might well have felt the need to make something more straightforward, something with a beginning, middle and end in that order that made hard narrative sense. I actually like his more allegorical work but watching this muscular crime thriller made me glad that he can turn something out like this, still.
Austin Butler reminds me of a young Brad Pitt without the macho bluster. Ok, maybe not in Dune II but certainly here where his Hank lives with development paralysis that he will probably have for life. I won't spoil why he didn't make it into the baseball league but the reason is deep seated enough to give him painful nightmares many years after the incident. The more we learn of this the better we see that he's keeping his head just above the surface tension. He still hasn't quite confronted the possibility that he is destined to be just like the old characters who are his bar's regulars and owners. If he has a motivation it is to keep everything the same as it is now. He keeps the trouble of his past behind a placid face. It's this story's job to turn that into a rictus of agony.
And as this is an Aranofsky movie, we get all this with a layer of kitchen grease and a sheen of beauty. Yvonne (a luminous Zoe Kravitz) and Hank facing each other after racing to get their kits off is sweaty, smelly and alluring, a workaday erotic. Manhattan's weary old streetscapes are both enlivened through action and loom from the weather as indifferent artefacts. Goose that I am, I didn't look out for sight of the pre-2001 Twin Towers but the scene to scene setting doesn't need them. Portishead on the radio feels more like the time. As the storms of violence enter or converge, it's almost a comfort to think of the era before the crazy quilt we live under now.
The lightness beneath the mounting brutality and suspense is kept low. This is necessary to allow us to persist through some convincingly choreographed violence and very dark morality. It's nothing like the knockabout goofiness in the trailer which makes it look like mid-period Coen brothers, but the lightness is where the warmth resides and its supply is kept to a constant undercurrent. Aranofsky's helming is nothing but confident as he keeps the easier comedy from the extreme characters dangerous rather than comic.
A strange aspect of this movie is the sight of fine grain in a film that was shot on 8K digital. I can't find out why that is beyond assuming it was the same kind of process to make it look like film that other titles have used. The strange thing about that is that it immediately reminded me of how Madonna's 90's single Erotica had a sample of vinyl record noise imposed on its entirely digital soundstage. Portishead, heard on the soundtrack along with a host of other trip hoppers from the era, used samples of their own jams to build their sound. Aranofsky's use of the grain, here, feels like a sneaky kind of nostalgia. The pummeling violence, informed by Asian cinema choreography (but not campily, the way Tarantino uses it) stops the spread of that nostalgia. It's an odd moment of detail.
So, it works. Tim Smith's punk works. The Hassidic gangsters work (though their last line is too cute to work) and the setting of the last of the late nineties before the craved new world of runaway found footage success, mobile phone movies, unbridled internet turned capitalist captors and the mainstreaming of political fantasy. This was a time when a Hank could confront in clear lines, the worst of his faults and seek to rise to invention and success. Is this Darren Aranofsky's own farewell to the era that wtinessed his rise with Pi, another story about a talented nice guy beseiged by violent interests. It is harder to be that now, harder to discern the lines. It's the clarity we miss, even if we know it was also illusory. This is fun, it has grave concerns but it's still fun.
Oh ... stay for the end credits.
Caught Stealing is currently on general release.
