I've been caught stealing, once, when I was five
dir: Darren Aronofsky
2025
He’s back! But then he’s never really been away.
Darren Aronofsky’s last film (The Whale) wasn’t that long ago (2022), and it had the odd distinction of being very successful awards-wise for people involved in the film other than himself, but hated by audiences and critics. This feels like… no-one really cares that much to even criticise it, but some people want to act like it’s a return to form. My point is you could hardly tell – every film Aronofsky has ever made has been significantly different from the ones that came before. The closest you could come to is say it’s set in a similar New York to Requiem for a Dream, but this comes across almost as a comic crime caper in comparison, and it’s nowhere near as depressing.
It is really strange, in my head, to watch something that is deliberately set in New York in 1998 and to think of it as a period piece, as a historical artefact. I mean, I know that it was, on paper, 27 years ago, it’s just that it doesn’t feel like it was nearly three decades ago.
Our clearest signal that it is a different time, different place, is that the World Trade Centre towers still stand, proudly, made of wholesome, American CGI, unaware that they would be mere dust in three years’ time.
Hank (Austin Butler) works bar at place called Paul’s Bar. Something something baseball. Baseball is or was very important to him. A car crash keeps being referred to and keeps being brought up again and again. I am guessing it is of some significance.
Hank has a neighbour, a British mohawked punk called Russ (Matt Smith, who was a Doctor, at some point?) who seems like a bit of a lunatic, but he needs a favour – look after me cat, he says, which Hank is reluctant to do.
Within minutes of Russ disappearing, some Russian thugs turn up and one of them beats up Hank so viciously that Hank loses a kidney.
That’s definitely going to make being a drunken fuck-up way harder. Pretty soon everyone seems to be after Hank, or Russ’s cat, or both. And when I say ‘everyone’ in a city of so many millions, it’s a cast of characters distinct enough and violent enough that Hank’s continued living and breathing is not guaranteed.
There’s a cop (the great Regina King), there’s two super-violent Hasidic brothers (Liev Schreiber and Vincent D’Onofrio), there’s Bad Bunny playing someone called Colorado, and the Russian skinheads keep coming back again and again for Hank’s other kidney. Hank has a girlfriend (Zoë Kravitz), who is around long enough to establish that despite being an appalling drunk, Hank can still get it up, but not much longer than that. Her character exists to give Hank motivation to change in the first half of the film and then a reason to do what he does in the back half of the film. It’s a shame because she’s pretty great in all she does, just not here.
Hank is a hapless character, in that bad shit keeps happening to him and none of it is really his fault, but it’s hard to feel that bad for him. He cries a lot, which, at least to me, indicates that even if he makes lots of bad decisions, he’s at least still in touch with his emotions. He at least cares about his mother back in Los Angeles, he at least cares about the cat. Other people threaten the cat, or even hurt the cat, proving they are terrible people, and Hank doesn’t even like the cat, but if he didn’t care about it we would have thought he was irredeemable and not worthy of our time, either.
It’s a question you have to ask yourself when a main character in a crime caper-type movie plays a fuck-up who seems like he regrets many parts of his life: how does he earn his redemption, does it redeem his character, and do we care? All sorts of movies, even ones starring Jason Statham or Keanu Reeves, have characters that do “bad” things like kill or torture people, but it’s generally set up as being against their will, as in, they have no choice in the matter, and it’s because of something bad that happened to someone they loved or something terrible they themselves did. If they just protect this one innocent boy or girl, or save one person (which will require killing 130 or so other people), then maybe they’ll be able to survive and forgive themselves…
Our Hank here doesn’t have that luxury. He’s not a killer of killers anyway. In fact for most of the flick he’s just a put upon guy with only one kidney, subject to all the forces arrayed against him like something rickety floating on a storm tossed ocean, going everywhere the wind or waves may blow. He has absolutely no recourses, no options and no agency, until he decides that he does.
Because this feels like a crime caper-y kind of flick, it has a lot of tension and feels pretty propulsive, but it has a comedic sensibility (despite the number of deaths and brutality of the arseholes hurting the people around Hank) that keeps it running smoothly. It does make it a little hard to take seriously – there’s something almost cartoonish about how things play out, or how nasty some of the characters are in ways that defy belief.
I wouldn’t say that the two brothers in their Hasidic outfits, randomly wandering around and killing people with impunity makes a lot of sense (outside of Gaza, maybe, but that’s not something to joke about), but I guess it’s somehow almost humorous that they could go on a gun and grenade crazy rampage at a Russian club, then stand around outside, and not for a second worry that the cops are going to arrest or attack them. Because maybe the joke is that no-one would expect people like them to do anything like that, especially so close to the Sabbath?
Because this is the film this is, the wicked Drucker Brothers take Hank along to their grandma’s place for Shabbat dinner where these hardcore criminals introduce a gentile to friends and family and Carole Kane, speaking in Yiddish almost exclusively, discussing whether they’re going to let him live or die. And Hank, being a polite chap, goes along with everything and commends the grandmother for the matzah ball soup she serves him.
Ah, just like bubbe used to make. The only characters in the movie afforded any complexity are these two brothers, who do great acts of evil without blinking an eyelid, and yet they contemplate their sins within the broader context of being observant orthodox Jews. At one point when they would be in breach of their duties with respect to the Sabbath, the brother played by D’Onofrio points out they are already in enough trouble with Hashem (God) as it is, and don’t want to anger him further. So, killing like twenty Russian people at a club = bad, but driving a car on the Sabbath = way worse.
Of course, this is all an elaborate way to get Hank to relive the worst moments of his life. Whenever he wakes up, it’s usually from a nightmare, and it’s usually reliving the car crash that ended his baseball career and killed his best friend Dale. So whenever the flick tries to make him drive, he demurs saying “can’t drive won’t drive”. He’s still too traumatised from that crash, from what he did.
But now the flick is saying to him “no longer will you be humoured, now you must drive, as a way of reclaiming your identity, to move on with the rest of your life, if you do indeed survive”. And drive he shall, for maybe a few minutes, before explicitly recreating the most traumatic moment of his life…
Austin Butler is the right age to play this role, but he doesn’t have the presence, yet, to convey a lot or to get a lot of emotion across. There’s not a lot of depth to the performance, but maybe it doesn’t require it to work. He can’t drop into a role the way many of the other actors (some of whom have very underwritten parts) here can and render them living, breathing, believable characters who feel like they existed before the events of this film’s timeframe. Even Griffin Dunne gets to cut loose and play a bit of a scumbag here (as Paul the bar owner), but you get the feeling that this guy has lived through a lot of shit, and through a lot of the city’s changes, and believably exists, unlike the main character.
Ah, the burdens of youth. I guess there’s nothing wrong with such a young lead playing a character that sounds, on paper, like he’d be a fair bit older and far more wrecked by life. I mean, come on. This guy looks like he’s eaten right and done yoga every day of his short life, not someone who boozes for breakfast lunch and dinner.
Boozes like Charles Bukowski, but looks like Troye Sivan, come on, honestly.
Although, really, what I’m unfairly doing is comparing this to Aronofsky’s earlier work. This may be set in the same city, but this is not a story about addiction, unlike Requiem. Even if the main character is a drunk, this isn’t about whether he’ll ever recover or not. As such, this is a far more hopeful, far more optimistic film that you would expect from someone who conjured the absolute brutality and hopelessness of the ending to Requiem for a Dream. We feel like, yeah, maybe Hank will be able to make it in the end, because he’s not a horrible person who’s done horrible things (unlike everyone else), he was just a naif in the wrong place at the right time, and maybe he doesn’t need to keep making himself suffer over what happened when he was a teenager.
You know, the CAR ACCIDENT! The one the ruined his life and stopped him from being a baseball champion?
It’s fleet, it’s funny, it maybe doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it doesn’t stop long enough for it to matter. Bad decisions are made until almost no-one is left alive to question anyone’s version of events, and maybe that’s the least plausible part of it all, but it hardly matters.
The film has a propulsive soundtrack by Idles, and feels era appropriate, somehow. I dreaded / looked forward to the obvious 90s song that I was sure would turn up, given the title, but then I was pleasantly surprised when the song in the outro was the sublime Luckiest guy on the Lower East Side by the Magnetic Fields, so there was that to look forward to. Somehow this ends with something close to a happy ending, which is remarkable, when you think about it. And it felt somewhat earned, so that’s okay.
8 times I thought oh my aching kidneys out of 10
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“We shouldn’t have let the goy drive.” – no, you really shouldn’t have - Caught Stealing
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