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In the film Caught Stealing, Austin Butler is a sad sack bartender.
Just by agreeing to cat sit for his neighbor, he gets dragged into a world of grizzly violence, as competing criminal factions threaten his life and his loved ones as they search for a huge wad of cash that they are wrongly convinced he is hiding.
It's a throwback film, for whatever that's worth.
It's the kind of film they don't make anymore.
I think Hitchcock's the wrong man meets Reservoir Dogs and then throw in a great cast.
Zoe Kravitz, Matt Bunny, Virginia King, Leo Schreiber, Vincent D'Onofrio, and Matt Smith.
I'm Glenn Weldon, this is NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour, and we're talking about caught stealing.
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Joining me today is journalist and host of the podcast Black Queer, Ken and Trevelle Anderson.
Hey, Trevelle.
Hello, hello.
Hello.
And also joining us today is podcast producer and film and culture critic Kate Young.
Welcome back, Kate.
Hi.
I am so curious what you thought of this film.
Let's get into it.
In Caught Stealing, Austin Butler is Hank, a bartender at an East Village dive bar in the 1990s.
His girlfriend Yvonne is an EMT.
She's played by Zoe Kravitz.
When his British punk neighbor, Russ played by Matt Smith asks him to cat sit, Hank finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time and gets brutally beaten up by a bunch of criminals led by Bad Bunny.
When he turns to the cops for help, a sympathetic detective played by Regina King informs him that he's become entangled in a war between various crime families, including one that includes two Orthodox Jewish brothers, played by Vincent D'Onofrio and Liev Schreiber.
Hank's life comes apart as the criminal underworld becomes convinced that he knows where a huge cache of stolen cash can be found.
Will Hank fight back?
Can Hank fight back?
It's directed by Darren Aronofsky, who's made great films like Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler and Black Swan, but who most recently made a very, very terrible film.
Called The Whale.
Which one of them showed up for caught stealing?
We're going to find out.
Kate, what'd you think?
I mean, did I like this film?
I didn't not like this film.
Okay.
I enjoyed the experience of watching this film.
I mostly had a good time.
I am fond of a good cross-section of this cast, so it was fun to spend some time with them.
But I'm not really sure what I was expecting from Aronofsky.
I...
Wanted to do crimes over the whale.
So I think on that bit alone, this is a significant improvement.
But there are a lot of points, I think, like bullets, that he kind of checks off as he goes, and I don't know that they all fit.
I think the individual pieces mostly work.
I have some other quibbles, but, I mean, we'll get into those later.
Yeah, we will.
I think in many ways, what's most interesting about this film is that it's a Darren Aronofsky film, if that makes sense.
We'll talk about it.
But, Trevelle, I glean...
From the giggle that you're a little less sold on this film.
You know.
So one thing interesting I thought you said Glenn, is that this is the kind of movie they don't make anymore.
Right?
For me it was the kind of movie you know how, back in the day, you used to just scroll through the cable box to find something on TV when you couldn't self-select.
And so it reminds me of just flipping through the channels and then you stumble on something and you're like, yeah sure.
I call this Sunday afternoon movies.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
You enjoy it.
You watch it.
And then at the end of it, you're like, huh, okay.
And then you just go on about your life.
Like it doesn't stick to you in any real way.
And, you know, maybe movies don't need to stick to people all the time.
But it was something that I was just like, huh, okay, you had these people doing these roles.
Interesting.
Interesting.
You know, before we started recording, we kind of gave, like, brief heads up.
And I was like, oh, I'm more positive on this film than either of these two folks are.
I don't know if that's true now.
I think from the tone you both are giving me, I'm kind of there.
I found this film very simplistic but satisfying.
And I think that is because that's exactly what it's engineered to be.
Just the ways to get an audience on your protagonist's side, a way to win them over and make them care about your hero including, but not limited to, Save the Cat, which comes into play here.
But they just keep piling up in a way that I found kind of...
Hilariously obvious and kind of artless.
I mean, they're going full Robert McKee at this thing.
And I'm like, okay, this is what we're doing.
All right.
I kind of respect that it never tries to hide the fact that it's pushing your buttons.
I mean, I don't think I would never call this film stylish or innovative in any way, but it is what those screenwriting cliches exist for it to be, which is effective for me.
I mean, you get on the roller coaster, You start going up that first incline.
You hear the gears kind of chunk into place.
Tragic backstory.
Chunk.
Save the cat.
Chunk.
Something in Hank's past has to be confronted, embraced, addressed.
If the film's going to allow him to stop suffering...
I mean, it's very Old Testament, this film, right?
Very Book of Job.
We even get the ka-chunk of, you can't pull that trigger, you're not a killer, which...
It is the year of our Lord 2025.
We cannot still be doing this.
Cinema is over 100 years old.
But we are.
But we are in this film, Trayvon.
Exactly.
But as things got worse and worse for Hank, I found myself just kind of shrugging.
Like, okay.
This is it.
And Treville, you're right.
The second you leave this theater, this movie just dissipates.
But when I was in that van or SUV or whatever, riding with Schreiber and D'Onofrio.
I was along for that ride.
You know, this is the beauty of going to the movie theater to watch a movie, right?
You have to be on the ride.
I mean, you could leave if you want to.
But you kind of have to be on the ride.
I kind of found myself wanting to be let off personally.
Sure.
After the first one or two fall into place.
I think if you're used to watching these kinds of movies, then you can kind of peg some of the others that are going to come right.
Extremely predictable. for me, it made it difficult to watch.
Like, I was along for the ride and then I was also, like, side-eyeing everything.
I was like, where's the next trope coming from?
Because I feel it just around the corner.
I think in addition to the fact that the movie's so tropey, by about the halfway point, like...
We're just getting a hat and a hat.
It's the same stuff over and over and over again.
And it really it made me think of the way that we talk about music being something to solve as opposed to something to enjoy.
Like, by the time we'd gotten there, I'm just sitting there being like, yep, call that.
Yep, call that.
I knew that's gonna happen.
Call that.
There was no surprise, really, anymore.
And I do think that the performances are good enough to kind of make the runtime well, not quite worth it.
That's a whole other issue.
But to make it so that I could at least enjoy myself while I was there.
I don't know that this is a movie that I would recommend to people.
Yeah.
It's so artless.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
You mentioned the cast, which is a saving grace this film has.
Let's talk about that.
Griffin Dunn is in this film as Paul, the owner of the bar that Hank works in.
He's in it because he's Griffin Dunn and he's great.
He's also in it because it's a shout out to After Hours, a film that this is definitely drafting off of.
Regina King is in this movie playing a badass.
What's going to be wrong with that?
Roger Ebert used to say if Harry Dean Stanton or M Emmett Walsh is in a movie, it can't be a bad movie.
I was going to update that with Regina King.
Then I went to her IMDb page and, you know, she's got a long career.
Let's just put it that way.
She's been around a lot.
So I'm not going to say that, because I'm not going to be out here in these streets defending daddy daycare.
But she's always fun.
Schreiber, D'Onofrio, Carol Kane is in this.
They're having a ball.
Trayvon, did you have a ball with them at least?
I mean, I think the cast is the reason why I was like excited to check it out.
You know, Regina King can do no wrong in my book, even in this movie, for the record.
She can do no wrong.
Now, when I am recapping her brilliance on screen, will I mention caught stealing?
Probably not.
Right.
But even Regina King has to fill in the roles between the major career-defining ones as well.
But there are so many names that I think is going to pull people in.
But I personally was let down.
Okay.
You know, you've got Zoe Kravitz.
You've got Regina King.
You've got Liev Schreiber.
What are we doing here?
And this is kind of what we get as the result.
I think one of the biggest issues I had with this one is that it's just too long.
I'm not against a particular runtime but like you feel every single minute of this movie to the point that like I don't even remember what the plot point was but I was like oh right we must be in like act three and I looked at my watch we were an hour in.
And it kept happening.
Like, I think that the pace of this movie is really, really off.
It doesn't make sense.
There are like three different endings.
I really wanted to like this.
I am a huge Austin Butler fan.
I was rooting for him after Elvis.
Like, I loved him in Dune.
Like, I do think that this is a really good role for him, that I think is the first thing.
But this movie is not structured in such a way that it allows any of the people in this film to do any of their best work.
They kind of can't.
And I don't know that that is their fault.
I think the one thing that I was really, really frustrated with is the way that he uses the Black female characters.
And we don't necessarily need to get into that, but I think that was the biggest black mark for me.
Mostly because it's the kind of thing that is very easily avoided if you pay attention.
It's actually quite... disappointing to see yet another trope right the way all the folks of color you know but particularly the black women are used in this narrative definitely leaves you with a sour taste you know if you come from a particular kind of intersection right This is an Aronofsky film.
Now, I think it's safe to say that Aronofsky's films historically are tough to sit through.
He tests audiences.
He doesn't go for crowd pleasing.
That's not his thing.
But this film has such a simple, pulpy formula.
He makes the Hank character go through such crap that he's playing with fire.
Because when you manipulate an audience's emotions to the extent that he does here, we all know we've seen movies before Hank has to get.
Something like a moment.
He doesn't have to have like a big Rambo retribution, but there has to be a moment of catharsis and it needs to land.
If you are torturing your protagonist to the extent that he does here and, by extension, torturing us, and you don't give us that moment of catharsis, we're going to come after you with torches and pitchforks.
Right.
Unless you're going art house, I guess.
Right.
Unless you're doing Requiem for a Dream, where the bleakness is the point.
Or you're doing, like...
Michael Hennick of Funny Games, where your point is, you know, let's indict the audience in their delight of violence.
Blah blah, moralistic BS.
That's not this.
This film, I think, is aimed squarely at the cineplex, not the art house.
I think there is plenty of moralistic BS in this film, all that Book of Job stuff, but it is in service to delivering that satisfaction at the end, not hand-wringing at the nature of violence.
I got to respect it for that.
I don't think it makes it a particularly interesting movie.
I think it makes it a fascinating movie from Darren Aronofsky, who does not do that.
Yeah, I think that was probably the thing that I was most surprised about.
It did not feel tonally like something I would expect from him.
And in returning to the way that the rhythm of this film is off, the tone of this film is off.
It just goes wildly for him one end to the other, because a lot of this movie is really funny, right.
And that's not something that you necessarily think is coming after the first, you know, inciting incident happens.
Like there is so much punching in this movie.
And I'm not against that.
I think for the most part, it actually makes sense.
But for me, as someone who like does not like to see people get beat up like I, had to cover my eyes a few times.
People really get beat up.
I'm not too into the fighting and the gore and all of that either, Kay.
I definitely covered my eyes or closed my eyes a couple times as well.
And yet, that kind of stuff didn't keep me.
You know, I kept seeing all of that and then just kind of feeling like, okay, is the movie over yet?
Because, like you mentioned earlier, there are a number of points that feel like endings, and yet we keep going.
And maybe that gets to your point, Glenn about kind of just the energy and the style that perhaps Darren was trying to convey with this film, compared to some of his others, and the pacing with some of the others.
But it didn't quite, you know, connect for me.
We've used the word artless a couple of times in this podcast so far.
I mean, that's what it feels like.
It just feels like let's get them to point B as quickly and as efficiently as possible, which means we're sacrificing things like nuance.
And depth.
Okay, so I have a weird question to ask you both about the production design of this film.
I spent a lot of time in New York in the 90s.
That is not a brag.
I could have made better choices.
But in and around the Lower East Side and the East Village and St.
Mark's Place.
Band stickers that are all kind of yellow because they're nicotine stained.
And you walk in and you're hit with stale beer and broken toilets.
And there's a shot of him in this film walking past a Kim's video.
And y'all, I felt a physical like a pang of loss, a physical pang like if someone had poked me in the stomach.
Now, y'all are young.
And when you look at the New York of this movie, does the fact that they went the extra mile for some of that authenticity matter?
Does that register with you in any way?
Or do you look at this film and you just see it like, oh, this is a period piece?
I mean, I would have been eight at the time of this film.
This is what I was trying to allude to without saying it outright, but thank you.
So I can't really speak to the authenticity of it.
I will say that...
There's a point in which Zoe Kravitz's character calls a cab.
And I was like, why is she calling a cab?
And I was like, right, no, it's 998.
And the payphones.
I was like, oh, yeah, payphones.
I could tell when he picked up a payphone.
I knew that the earpiece was going to be greasy with somebody else's skin.
I knew that the bar in Paul's bar was sticky.
I could feel Paul's bar.
I could smell Paul's bar.
I got the details right.
That's what I'll say.
I thought we were going to fight over this movie, but I think we kind of all were on the same page at the end.
I think we all arrived at exactly the same place.
Well, tell us what you think, though, about caught stealing.
You can do that on Letterboxd or on Facebook if you're one of my angrier aunts and uncles.
We'll have links in our episode description.
That brings us to the end of our show.
Kate Young, Trayvon Anderson, thank you so much for being here.
Thank you.
Thank you so much for having me.
This episode was produced by Carly Rubin, Janae Morris and Mike Katziff and edited by our showrunner, Jessica Reedy.
And Hello, Come In provides our theme music.
Thanks for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR.
I'm Glenn Weldon, and we'll see you all next time.
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