Some thoughts on Caught Stealing

If you have a script like Caught Stealing, where a “normal guy” gets entangled in a dangerous mess with violent thugs, you can make an enjoyable romp like Snatch or Nobody, or you can make a serious, character-based drama like Jackie Brown or Uncut Gems, or you can make a paranoid thriller like The Man Who Knew Too Much or Marathon Man. What Aaronovsky has done is combine all those approaches and then produce it like it was Lawrence of Arabia.

Caught Stealing, most importantly for me, EXACTLY captures the look, mood, textures and atmosphere of the Lower East Side in the 1990s, which is where I spent my 30s. The details are correct down to every sticker, graffito, pile of garbage, cigarette butt and piss stain. It’s a very rare thing for me to be able to smell a movie, but that’s what this one accomplished.

Of course, there weren’t criminal escapades going on on the scale seen in the movie, but, walking the streets of Alphabet City on a Saturday night, one always SUSPECTED things like this were going on. If it’s not a true story, it’s an incredibly true mise en scene. Every character looks like someone I would see on St. Mark’s Place, every song pouring out of every passing car is accurate to time and place, and Austin Butler’s front door is identical to the one I had on 6th St. on Indian Row, in the 1800s tenement apartment I lived in, where the “bedroom” had no window except the one that was a pass-through into the kitchen (which had a bathtub next to the stove), which had been boarded up decades earlier.

The thing that gets me is, the script would have worked in present day. Aaronovsky shoots it in period, on real streets, in New York City, which involves tons of money, and can easily double the budget of the movie. Why did he devote so much time and energy and budget to bringing that time and place to life? Well, of course that was Aaronovsky’s time and place too, when he was making Pi and Requiem For a Dream. And young screenwriters like me would go to see those movies and dream about the movies that we would make when we got the chance. And there was a whole community of artists, filmmakers and writers and performance artists and puppeteers and vaudeville acts and a million other kinds of cultural miscreants, and that was the scene that produced Aaronovsky, and me, and I’m forever grateful that he bothered to remember that time and place, and to recreate it with such an attention to detail and a total absence of sentimentality. The place was a filthy hellhole and the movie presents it as such. Tompkins Square Park was the scene of riots protesting the yuppies moving in, but the yuppies were moving into abandoned buildings that were firetraps and shooting galleries, not sweet little communities where people got along or ethnic neighborhoods that got displaced. They were moving into buildings that were cheap because people had died in them.

There was another layer to the movie that sold it for me, but probably only for me. The plot revolves around this guy, played by Austin Butler, who had been a star baseball player in his teens but had an accident and can no longer play. Instead, he follows the team he almost joined, the SF Giants, and calls his mother, who coached him as a teen, after every game to discuss the game. It’s a movie about loss, and how to recover from it. What does one do when one has lost everything? How does one move on when one’s identity, all one’s hopes and dreams, are erased in a heartbeat? Anyway, at a certain point I realized that Austin Butler’s character is a lot like me. Like him, I almost got the chance to make it big. Ironically, I’ve always looked at my career as never hitting a home run, but always managing to get on base. I wrote a lot of screenplays, and a handful of them were made, and two of them were actual hits, although I was not credited for one of them. Neither has left a cultural footprint, but I did enter the arena and, for a few years, had the opportunity to play, as the movie calls it, “real ball.” At its deepest level, Caught Stealing is an ode to perseverance, about keeping going when there’s nothing left to keep going for, and at a certain point I realized that I was watching a movie by the guy whose movies I used to go see when I was dreaming of being America’s next great writer-director, and I still go to see movies every week even though I’m no longer in the movie business, and I realized that, tonight, I was watching a movie about myself watching this movie.

The acting, by the way, is uniformly great, but I want to give special shoutouts to Griffin Dunne and Vincent D’Onofrio, both of whom vanish into roles that any other actor would have played as stock one-joke characters.