Caught Stealing

Austin Butler

Darren Aronofsky's Caught Stealing is another depressing failure within the decline of a promising auteur. It is not as abject a failure as The Whale, but it is also not as interesting a failure as Mother! was. The flick is a grubby lark in which Austin Butler plays a bartender mistakenly caught up in the search for a cache of ill-gotten gains. The narrative, penned by Charlie Huston based on his novel, is a MacGuffin nothing set on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1998. A host of characters intersect, including Russian gangsters, Hassidic gangsters, and a crooked cop, but the film is only fitfully amusing or engrossing.

The biggest flaw is that Austin Butler has no real character to play. He's given a traumatic back story and a devotion to the San Francisco Giants, but the audience has little to latch onto besides Butler's baby blues. Very little empathy is generated for Butler's beleaguered bartender even as he is constantly being chased and pummeled through the course of the movie. The two lead female parts are so faintly drawn that the considerable talents Zoë Kravitz and Regina King are wasted. Caught Stealing is a typical Tinseltown concoction with very few signs of a personal touch. One of the few signs of the man behind the camera are the gratuitous instances of bodily secretion.

The film almost succeeds as a spike-collared Valentine to the Lower East Side. I enjoyed Idles' score and some of the supporting players. I especially enjoyed Vincent D'Onofrio and Liev Schreiber kvetching in Yiddish and the contributions of Action Bronson, Griffin Dunne, and Carol Kane. There is the occasional interesting image, I liked the dual images of vehicles T-boning light poles, but Caught Stealing is largely forgettable.