Guns N’ Roses

My thoughts on Caught Stealing and The Roses

Set in New York circa 1998, Caught Stealing, the latest film from Darren Aronofsky, features Austin Butler as Hank Thompson, a one-time baseball prodigy whose career was wrecked following a tragic drunk-driving accident (one that continues to haunt him throughout the story via that old standby, the gradually expanding flashback) and who now spends his days and night serving drinks at a dive bar, hanging with paramedic girlfriend Yvonne (Zoe Kravitz) and following the progression of his beloved San Francisco Giants. That all changes when Hank’s British punk neighbor Russ (Matt Smith) has to suddenly return home to see his ailing father and asks him to care for his pet cat Bud (Tonic, best known for his turn in the Pet Sematary remake). This half-hearted good deed backfires spectacularly when it turns out that Russ has run afoul of Russian, Puerto Rican and Orthodox Jewish mobsters and they are perfectly willing to put the screws to Hank—with a ruptured kidney for starters—until he divulges information to them that he simply doesn’t possess. The increasingly pummeled Hank tries to reach out to investigating cop Roman (Regina King) for help but when that doesn’t pan out and things get increasingly violent, Hank has to figure out a way to elude his pursuers and extricated himself from his predicament before it is too late.

Needless to say, this is not the kind of project one might normally associate with Aronofsky, whose films (including Pi, Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler and Black Swan) have typically dealt with people pushing themselves to physical, mental and emotional extremes in the pursuit of their particular obsessions. In the wake of such dismal recent efforts as the crackpot environmental allegory mother! and the deeply stupid The Whale, I can see why he might have wanted to step outside of his particular box and work on something out of his usual comfort zone but at no time during Caught Stealing do you ever get a sense of what it was about the material (based on a novel by Charlie Huston, who also wrote the screenplay) that made him want to opt for this particular project other than to serve as a sort of homage to a slightly better movie involving a bewildered guy on the run on the streets of New York, Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, right down to casting that film’s beleaguered lead, Griffin Dunne, in a supporting part.

The difference is that while Scorsese managed to find just the right blend of dark comedy, urban horror and paranoia to make for a film that inspired both big laughs and no small amount of genuine tension, Aronofsky never quite figures out how to make the mixture work with the differing tones clashing rather than complementing each other. Another problem is that while some of the character-driven moments are okay, not even Aronofsky and his skilled cast (which also includes the likes of Liev Schreiber, Vincent D’Onofrio and Bad Bunny) can make much of the increasingly familiar plot mechanics as they wind up dominating the proceedings, no matter how many twists and turns are thrown into the mix in an attempt to gin up interest. Although made with a certain degree of skill (even if its brash, in-you-face approach is a little too reminiscent at time of Guy Ritchie’s work) and definitely preferable to his last couple of films, Caught Stealing is easily the most anonymous and meaningless film that Darren Aronofsky has done to date and anyone hoping to see him returning to the creative heights that he established in his early films will just have to keep waiting and hoping for that day to come

.Having famously been adapted into the hit 1989 comedy of the same name from Danny DeVito, The War of the Roses, Warren Adler’s darkly comic 1981 novel about a married couple whose formerly passionate relationship has curdled into something that went beyond the merely toxic into the downright homicidal, now returns to theaters in The Roses, a new version that features a new setup and different gender dynamics but also includes far fewer genuine laughs along the way. This time around, Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman play Theo and Ivy, a pair of Brits whose whirlwind romance lands them in America, where he works as an architect and she stays at home with the kids awhile nursing her culinary ambitions via a small seafood restaurant known as We Have Crabs! However, when Theo’s career literally comes crashing down and Ivy’s restaurant unexpectedly becomes a foodie phenomenon, neither one handles the shift in the power dynamic very well—he becomes a stay-at-home dad pushing his kids towards athletic glory while she is away all the time expanding her empire. Things seem to settle for a bit when Theo sets about designing and building their dream house, paying for it with Ivy’s money, but the resentments finally become too much to bear and they decide to end the marriage. However, neither one is willing to relinquish the house to the other and they go at each other in increasingly cruel and violent ways in order to get what they want, no matter the cost.

The previous film version of the story had a lot going for it but perhaps DeVito’s canniest decision (outside of letting the dog live) was to cast his Romancing the Stone co-stars Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner as the Roses—since they had already demonstrated extraordinary chemistry between them in that earlier effort, the film was able to zip through the rosier early days of their relationship in order to focus more on how it all eroded to the point where they were literally at each others throats over possession of the house. By comparison, the screenplay by Tony McNamara spends so much time charting the entire course of the relationship of the Roses that the film is roughly two-thirds over before the divorce plans and subsequent acts of one-upsmanship finally kick in. This isn’t necessarily a bad idea in theory but it doesn’t work here because McNamara’s observations of the shifts in their dynamic are mostly shallow and occasionally nonsensical (the stuff involving Theo pushing the kids to athletic excellence is little more than an absurd contrivance to get the younger ones away from the scene before the fireworks begin in earnest) and director Jay Roach never really commits to the bit, constantly pulling his punches rather than going for the jugular in the manner than the material needs, essentially the same thing he did when he transformed Meet the Parents from a jet-black comedy of errors into a far less scabrous, sitcom-style franchise.

An even more mystifying problem is the casting of Cumberbatch and Colman as the central couple. Both are excellent actors, of course, and they certainly know how to make the most of the increasingly venomous lines that they hurl at each other over the course of the film. What they don’t do, however, is make for a particularly convincing couple at any point. We never really believe that they would act the way that they do towards each other at any given point, not at the beginning when we are supposed to buy into the white-hot connection between them that has them shagging in a walk-in freezer only a few minutes after they first meet nor later on as their respective fortunes begin to change in unexpected ways. The dynamic becomes especially unconvincing towards the end because there is never a point where they seem capable of delivering the kind of physical, verbal and emotional damage that they inflict on each other in the final stretch. Although there are a few scattered laughs here and there (with Allison Janney stealing her one scene as a particularly vicious divorce lawyer), The Roses is a tepid little dud that takes an alternately hilarious and hair-raising narrative of a relationship gone sour and makes it into something both tedious and eminently forgettable.