Caught Stealing

Austin Butler leads a terrific cast in this '90s-era New York period piece, shot, designed, and tricked out to evoke the vibe of the myriad low-budget indie crime capers that flooded cinemas after the success of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. The fact that the vast majority of those Tarantino wannabes weren't very good movies doesn't seem to intimidate this one. The film comes courtesy of novelist Charlie Huston, who adapted his book for the screen, and director Darren Aronofsky. It's odd to see the grim arthouse director of Pi, Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler, Black Swan, and mother! at the helm of such a goofy genre exercise, but after The Whale, who can blame the guy for wanting to lighten up a bit?

Butler plays a former high-school baseball player who almost went pro until a car accident derailed his career. Now he's a fun-loving, hard-partying bartender who avoids getting behind the wheel. We know we'll like this movie at least a little when Butler's character first enters the bar where he works, and we see that Griffin Dunne plays his greasy boss with long, straggly grey hair. Yet the film doesn't make a big deal about the casting, hiding Dunne under heavy make-up and not giving him a close-up. I didn't know there would be so many heavy hitters in this cast, but they're all introduced in a similar, character-first manner that doesn't try to impress with famous faces. That technique is always welcome, although it's out of character with the type of movies this film is paying homage to, which often gave their star supporting actors a big dolly-in or a freeze-frame introduction.

Butler's got a sexy girlfriend (Zoë Kravitz), a paramedic who is really hoping he'll grow out of the extended adolescent phase he's currently enjoying. He's also got a drug dealer neighbor (Matt Smith) who asks him to watch his cat while he's out of town. While Butler doesn't exactly agree, he winds up playing Llewyn Davis to a feline that bites. Of course, there's more to this catsitting gig than meets the eye, and soon he's being pursued by Russian mobsters, Jewish gangsters, and a slippery cop.

The film follows the formulas and mimics the styles of those mid-'90s crime pictures, though updated for contemporary tastes with less silly humor and more overt violence. I say mimic, because I never felt like I was watching an actual mid-'90s movie. Everything here is just too precise. The art direction is detailed to a fault, and the fake film grain slathered all over the digital images looks more like an Instagram filter than celluloid. At a couple of action moments, shots appeared to be photographed at a high frame rate, entirely antithetical to the era the visuals are meant to evoke. The cinematography is by Matthew Libatique, who has done incredible work for Aronofsky, Spike Lee, Jon Favreau, and Bradley Cooper, among others. Still, this picture has a trying-too-hard quality unworthy of the renowned DP. Similarly, the fight scenes all feel choreographed, as does an early love scene between Butler and Kravitz. I'm not sure if there's something about how Aronofsky stages everything here that rings false, or if the story simply failed to engage me sufficiently, but the results kept me watching from a removed distance. I kept hoping to click into the film's style and rhythms, but as the stakes got higher and higher, I never felt myself getting more invested.

Still, those looking for an amusing '90s NYC nostalgia trip will find much to enjoy in Caught Stealing, especially a couple of characters that become prominent in the last act. These are two Hasidic hitman brothers who feel like they were lifted directly out of a movie from this era. Liev Schreiber and Vincent D'Onofrio play these homicidal Hebrews. Not only actors from the era this movie celebrates, but they are also movie stars who know how to have a good time in a picture like this without undercutting the power of the dangerous characters they're embodying. I wish more of the movie had struck the tonal balance that these two effortlessly nailed; then the resulting film might have felt less instantly disposable. I wasn't aware that this was an Aronofsky movie until the end credits, so while watching, I wondered if Steven Soderbergh and David Koepp had dashed off three forgettable little genre exercises this year. So if you loved Presence and Black Bag, take this review as a recommendation.