CAUGHT STEALING. Sad World, Broken World [REVIEW]

I’m not a fan of Darren Aronofsky’s films. His work concentrates, like a lens, all the things I usually can’t stand in cinema: reveling in suffering, pompous metaphysics, pseudo-philosophical platitudes, and a complete lack of irony. This explosive mixture sometimes leads to truly bizarre results. I still vividly remember a screening of Mother! during one edition of the American Film Festival in Wrocław. The sheer level of absurdity pouring off the screen had the entire audience in stitches (at one point, the friend sitting next to me literally ended up on the floor from laughter).

Some would call what we witnessed that day a collective lynching. Others (including the undersigned) would call it a perfectly adequate—and wonderfully spontaneous—reaction to a film that took itself and everything around it far too seriously. You can imagine my surprise, then, when a few months ago I saw the trailer for Caught Stealing in a cinema.

From the speakers blared The Clash’s Should I Stay or Should I Go, while Austin Butler dashed through the streets of New York, chased by Liev Schreiber and Vincent D’Onofrio, both disguised as Hasidic Jews. It was toe-tapping, energetic, stylish—it felt… loose. For a long moment I rubbed my eyes in disbelief, wondering if the editor had made some catastrophic mistake. Maybe he had lost a bet, or decided to get back at his employer for a scandalously low paycheck by swapping out Guy Ritchie’s, Shane Black’s, or Steven Soderbergh’s name for Darren Aronofsky’s. But there was no mistake. So I went to the screening skeptical, but not without hope.

For a brief moment it seemed like we might be witnessing a historic occasion: a Polish passport-holding director had pulled the metaphorical stick out of his lower regions and made something bearable. A light, unpretentious gangster comedy—perfect for the last weekend of summer. Alas, the phrase “it seemed” is key in the context of Aronofsky’s new film.

On the surface, Caught Stealing is exactly what the promotional materials promised. Hank Thompson, the protagonist, is a failed baseball player working night shifts at a local bar.

A handsome everyman who doesn’t bother anyone, conflict-averse, with a beautiful girlfriend at his side. His troubles begin with a simple misunderstanding. The recipe for disaster is the same as always: wrong time + wrong place. When his neighbor suddenly leaves town, Hank first gets brutally beaten up by two Russian gangsters, and then becomes entangled in a plot that is both life-threatening and absurd. At its center: Belgian ecstasy, four million dollars, and a charming cat that Hank takes care of in his friend’s absence.

On paper, it all sounds like first-rate entertainment. But Aronofsky finds something else in Charles Heston’s script—Heston also being the author of the novel the film is based on.

He drags to the surface the protagonist’s dark past, undermining the gangster comedy framework with an existential drama about an alcoholic haunted by the repercussions of a long-ago tragedy. Polish citizenship has its obligations. After just fifteen minutes I knew that the pleasant screening I had hoped for wasn’t going to happen: Caught Stealing is, at times, pure Aronofsky distilled to 100 percent. A protagonist hitting rock bottom, wallowing in misery, gradually losing everyone and everything he cares about.

The steady dose of suffering is upheld. “Sad world, broken world,” repeat the Hasidic characters played by Schreiber and D’Onofrio, and Aronofsky seems to be nodding along in agreement.

The problem is that this nihilism doesn’t mesh with the chosen genre. The result is that in Caught Stealing two radically different films constantly clash. One keeps its distance from the events on screen, stylizes the violence a little, and aims for a Tarantino-Coen grotesque tone.

The other has no distance at all—shot with a poker face, where violence is blunt, brutal, and horribly random. In the first, the story matters most. In the second, the protagonist does. This clash remains unresolved until the very end—which, surprisingly, takes on an optimistic tone. The collateral damage in this tug-of-war is, of course, the audience. While writing this review, a thought that has been returning to me for some time popped into my head again. How often do we, viewers and critics alike, project films onto ourselves in advance based on promotional materials? Trailers, posters, and distributor blurbs sell us a certain vision which, let’s be honest, doesn’t have to align with reality.

In such a setup, the screening becomes, at times, a brutally harsh collision with the truth. It’s hard not to feel at least a little disappointed when a film turns out to be something entirely different from what we were led to expect. Perhaps that’s my biggest issue with Caught Stealing. Because, truth be told, it’s not actually a bad film. Credit where credit is due: Aronofsky makes technically excellent movies, he doesn’t bore, he can build tension, and he directs actors deftly. But he still can’t tell even the simplest story without unnecessary self-seriousness—and the trailer for Caught Stealing had suggested that maybe this had changed.

As a side note to both this review and the film itself, I’d like to mention one more thing that my longtime friend and colleague Jędrzej drew my attention to.

According to Ukrainian casting director Ally Samoylenko, in Heston’s original script the Russian gangsters were actually petty Ukrainian thugs. Because of this, the production team approached Samoylenko with a request to prepare a list of actors potentially interested in the project. She began a broad search, excited at the thought of helping some compatriots break into Hollywood. I won’t go into the details here—Samoylenko herself explained them best in her own piece—but the punchline is particularly bitter: due to various backroom dealings, both roles were ultimately given to Russians, including Yuriy Kolokolnikov, who just days ago was added to Ukraine’s national security threat list. “Sad world, broken world,” as the two overdrawn Hasidim would say.