Batter or Worse: CAUGHT STEALING

Darren Aronofsky’s Caught Stealing is atypical for him since it’s shorn of self-conscious ambition. He’s a filmmaker usually loaded down with style while straining for abstractions and existential metaphor. When it works it works. Consider the Biblical fantasy of Noah or epic existential time-spanning sci-fi The Fountain or the panicked pressure-cooker allegory of mother! or the twirling mirrored ballet nightmare of Black Swan. He’s an energetic image-maker, expert at enveloping with consistent mood and getting committed performances out of talented casts. For better and worse, there are no small choices in an Aronofsky film. The hysteria of his addiction dramas, the manic druggy Requiem for a Dream and doom-laden overeating of The Whale, is maddeningly misjudged. But the jumpy intensity of the grit and grain to his character drama The Wrestler is intensely focused. When his choices hit, they hit hard; otherwise they’re painful wild swings that totally miss. So it’s fun to see his newest feature be his breeziest and least burdened by weighty themes. It’s an up-tempo, low-level thriller set on the streets of New York City. It’s 1998 and an alcoholic ex-baseball player (Austin Butler) is barely making it work as a bartender with a nice girlfriend (Zoe Kravitz). Too bad, then, that he makes the mistake of agreeing to watch a pet cat for his punk neighbor (Matt Smith). This gets him caught between competing drug dealing gangsters (Bad Bunny and some Russians on one side; Hasidic Vincent D’Onofrio and Liev Schreiber on the other) who think the punk left him a clue to their cash. 

It sets off a mad, darkly funny, increasingly violent scramble to get out of trouble. Not even a weary cop (Regina King) seems much help. He’ll have to do it himself. Butler makes such a fine, sympathetic presence at the center of the tension. He’s stepped confidently into leading man mode, using his physicality to get and hold attention in the frame with an easy charm and casual energy that’s somehow both perfectly posed and totally relaxed. Now there’s a Movie Star. He holds the center easily as the thriller plotting pops off around him. Aronofsky gives it all a hurtling momentum, like a madcap After Hours take (there’s even Griffin Dunne) on the kind of scrappy, chatty, irreverent post-Tarantino thrillers that would’ve been on screens in 1998. Now that’s commitment to period accuracy. It’s a movie of small choices with big effects: the crack of a bat to bring our lead out of a recurring nightmare; an affinity for elegant long tracking shots; a well-spun collection of needle drops; a steady teetering between lighthearted eccentric characterizations and heavy deadly twists and turns. The movie has speed on its side; the thing doesn’t feel thin until the credits have ended and you’re walking back to the parking lot. If it’s ultimately just glossy genre pulpiness for the sake of it, then at least it’s done with such a high level of confident skill. I could get used to this style of Aronofsky. 

Requiem for a Scream: mother!

Darren Aronofsky’s latest film, mother!, is a jangled, claustrophobic freakout, a Polanski-esque picture of domestic tension refracted into close, uncomfortable, intimate horror. It’s about miscommunication, a fundamental flaw in a relationship escalating into insurmountable obstacle as the situation grows into one out of control. The couple at its center live in a dreamy house in the middle of a forest clearing, with no road or driveway or any obvious means of escape. It’s mid-renovation, courtesy of the young wife (Jennifer Lawrence) who spends her days refurbishing the home. The older husband (Javier Bardem) is a writer we see poised with pen at the ready, but who never seems to write a word, or at least at first. As the film moves forward, their parallel mental states diverge, he a seemingly unstoppable obsessive people-person lit up with an almost divine (or devilish, perhaps?) zeal and she an increasingly vulnerable paranoiac understandably unsettled by a loss of control driven by her husband’s paradoxically uncommunicative openness. (It put me in mind of Aronofsky’s other works – Noah married to Black Swan, I suppose.) The film sticks closely, exclusively, to the wife’s perspective, pushing in with uncomfortable close-ups as her face reflects confusion, then stress, then mental anguish, and finally a complete and total breakdown. It’s understandable every step of the way, though seems to add up to less and less the longer it goes. 

The whole thing is shot in grainy, tremulous, shaky, close angles, maneuvering with maximum discomfort. We sit right up close to the boiling chaos about to erupt in this marriage, though the context for the leads’ personalities is sketched simply, hollowly, a clangorous and multipurpose metaphor. It’s clear from the beginning something is dangerously off about the couple, she far too patient and generous for his brooding dismissiveness. How often do we see her earnestly offer plain-spoken assertions of her wants and desires only to be rebuffed by his gruff selfishness? By the time a strange man (Ed Harris) shows up in the middle of the night coughing and smoking and asking if they have a spare room, it’s a sort of darkly funny laugh of recognition – an “of course he would” – to find the husband immediately agrees without consulting his wife. When their unannounced guest’s wife (Michelle Pfeiffer, dripping with the dark comedy of a contemptible houseguest, but oddly underused) turns up at the doorstep, she’s invited in, too. Then their grown sons are ringing the bell and one thing leads to another and it’s like the Marx brothers’ classic stateroom bit ran headlong into Repulsion. Lawrence plays relatable notes of total confusion, a sense of her world spinning out of control while everyone else acts like she’s the crazy one. Why are all these people piling into her house? What’s going on here?

Flowing with shock sensation – dripping blood, heartbeats in walls, crumbling architecture – the movie gets schlockier and nuttier as it goes, to the point where the wild sustained climax – I dare not spoil its shape or scope, but, boy howdy, does it take the inevitable progression of its plot to the farthest reaches of its insanity – had me thinking to myself, “what am I watching?” Aronofsky commits to the intensity of it all, building on the foundation of one sparsely characterized couple a muddled outsized allegory. Sure, Lawrence plays pained sweet homemaker, and Bardem plays smoldering artiste, but beyond that small flimsy bit of emotional scaffolding there’s nothing by way of personality or characterization to hold onto. (It’s one of those movies where the characters are unnamed, listed in the credits as simply Man and Woman and so on.) We only have pure shapeshifting symbolism (fitting for our current Mystique) – the twisted progression linking up inevitably with thoughts of domestic violence, societal misogyny, and cycles of abuse (both intimate and environmental), as well as the chaos that can follow in the wake of a tortured artist unable to handle fame. These grand ideas float through, but Aronofsky mostly highlights rattling unease and escalating abstract terror. This movie’s stressful, eventually howling with screams and fire and death in increasingly brutal effects. Aronofsky’s a master at marshalling filmmaking techniques – precise sound design, intuitive cutting, thick filmic cinematography, intense performances – to push buttons, but here it’s at or near its most fruitless. It’s technically dazzling and utterly exhausting.

Rainy Day: NOAH

Darren Aronofsky’s Noah is abstract and literal, bombastic and tender, reverent and perverse, overwrought and undercooked, vindictive and compassionate, spiritual and silly. That may make it tonally and thematically more authentically Old Testament, but it also makes for a rather uneven movie. Aronofsky’s vision is one part Biblical epic, two parts digitally enhanced fantasy, both informed by an occasionally fevered approach to a quasi-environmentalist message. All of the above is then filtered through the Hollywood expectation machine, where you can’t be given over $100 million dollars and not throw in a third-act fight, an easily recognizable antagonist, and CGI rock giants. It’s nothing if not serious in the execution, faithful to the Biblical story about a righteous man told by God to build a massive ark to save animals (two of every kind) from an imminent worldwide flood meant to wipe out sinful hordes of humanity. The result is a film too glum to be of much camp value and far too ridiculous to take it all that seriously, but lingers with an odd power all the same.

At the center of it all is Russell Crowe, wearing the burden of Noah heavily on his shoulders. He trudges with his wife (Jennifer Connelly) and sons (Douglas Booth, Logan Lerman, and Leo McHugh Carroll) to get advice from his grandfather (Anthony Hopkins). The old man gravely helps him to interpret his vision of the world underwater, corpses floating by, animals swimming up towards the sunlit ark above. It’s a nightmarish image that gives Noah the strength to move forward and do what must be done. As the plot moves forward, the film addresses some of the tale’s most preposterous elements with answers that seem at once gloriously symbolic and thunderously inane. How did Noah and his family get the wood to build the ark? It was a magic forest they grew from a seed grandfather gave them that ancestors saved from the Garden of Eden. How did the animals show up, two by two no less? They followed a magic stream that bubbles up from that same seed. How did the family deal with the animals once on the ark? They put them into deep, peaceful comas with a magic potion. Later they wake them back up with the antidote.

These elements are treated so seriously, with much weight and overworked awe that it’s hard to know how we’re supposed to take it. Aronofsky and his co-writer Ari Handel wrestle with this simple story by turning the symbolic literal and back again. With cinematographer Matthew Libatique, he’s quick to sketch vivid, epic imagery and slow to synthesize coherence. It’s a clear labor of love, but that’s what also makes it a bit of a mess. This pre-flood world is a sparse, fallen fantasy world, a sort of Lord of the Rings-esque place of magic and monsters, sin and scares. It’s all so serious despite those rock giants (voiced by the likes of Nick Nolte and Mark Margolis) who are fallen angels cursed to walk the Earth who decide to help Noah build his ark, magic stones – strike them and they become fire – and Hopkins made up to look like a white-haired cave-dwelling wizard.

The mythic fantasy Aronofsky constructs appears meant to be partly a vaguely historic reality and an obvious abstraction for us to think through the notion of the relationship between man, the environment, and the divine and the obligations they have to each other. The intent is serious. No kid-friendly animal antics here. (Would you expect it from the director of The Wrestler and Black Swan?) But in striving for both reality and fantasy, it’s often neither, a colossal bore that no amount of dramatic imagery and intense emoting from the cast can cure. It’s no help that the film has some real transcendence within it, rubbing up against cheap drama that feels out of place.

A magical sequence has Crowe intone the story of Genesis while Aronofsky cuts to a Malickian Tree of Life time-lapse creation of the universe, the Big Bang sending the cosmos rapidly spinning down to Earth, evolution, Eden, exile, and, finally, the flood. Elsewhere, much is made out of Noah’s middle son’s preoccupation with finding a wife. His older brother already has a woman (Emma Watson, quite good) and he thinks he better get one while he still can. This subplot takes up a fair amount of energy, although the film doesn’t seem too preoccupied with how humanity will grow post-flood. Still elsewhere, conflict comes in the form of a villainous Ray Winstone who wants to kill Noah and his family for being so holier-than-thou, then leads armies to attack the ark once the rains come.

What is all this conventional interpersonal melodrama doing in a movie about spiritual crisis and the end of the world? That’s where the film is best, growing poignant and provocative. Aronofsky, echoing his 2006 ambitious philosophical sci-fi film The Fountain, is best at locating the real test of faith and emotional strain in his characters. The first night the family spends in the ark, the howling screams of those left to drown are carried in on the buffeting winds. The weight of morality weighs heavily upon them. Who are they to choose who lives and who dies? Perhaps they, too, should perish, the better to let nature take its course unblemished by human hands.

The entire flooding sequence, as the wood creaks, the door slams shut and the water crashes down, is effective and stressful. Aronofsky cuts to a wide shot of their boat in the distance, a craggy rock closer to the camera covered in a mass of people, clinging for their lives before slipping, washed off the face of the world. It’s a harrowing image articulating the great paradox at the center of the Noah story, as scary and searching as a pious Renaissance painting. But the great paradox of this Noah is how deeply strange and yet how weirdly conventional it manages to be. It’s not particularly good, often straight-faced silly in its loosely Biblical fantasy. (When the snakes slither up to the ark, Noah’s wife gives him a look that says, “Snakes are coming, too?”) But it’s so ambitious and thought provoking it is hard to dismiss entirely.

Stage Fright: BLACK SWAN

Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan has the kind of opening scene that gives a good idea of the film to follow. It starts with a spotlight slicing through inky black surroundings. In the center a ballerina is perfectly poised with elegant movements. The music of Tchaikovsky begins to boom. The ballerina spins. As the camera draws closer, we can hear the ragged, athletic breaths of the dancer. This is all set to be a film that will scrape away the surface glamour of the ballet, but then a darkly monstrous figure begins to dance with her. Then, Nina (Natalie Portman) wakes up, the opening scene fading like a dream. The film’s truest intentions burst forth. This is a film that will clamber around inside her head, bumping into all kinds of unsettling, destabilizing elements that are eating away at her psyche.

She’s a hardworking perfectionist ballerina in a well-established ballet company and has just been given the lead role in a new production of Swan Lake. It’s a high-pressure moment for her, the wrong time altogether to lose her mind. (Though when would be a good time?) The people that circle around her life are all menacing figures. Her mother (Barbara Hershey) is a controlling, domineering force of emotional manipulation. Her ballet director (Vincent Cassel) is a sleazy, molesting presence of abusive power. An older ballerina forced to retire (Winona Ryder) scowls drunkenly from the sidelines while a young ambitious ballerina (Mila Kunis) seems all too ready to worm her way into the lead role.

This is a terrifying collection of characters made all the more unsettling because of the unreliable narrator Nina proves to be. Are all of these characters as dangerous as they appear to be? It’s possible. Nina thinks that is the case. Could it instead be the case that a rattled mind of a naïve perfectionist has developed a harmful persecution complex that causes her to lash out irrationally? It’s possible. At first glance, the characters can seem one-dimensional, shrill and without nuance, but in the growing craziness of Nina’s mental state, who can say with absolute certainty how trustworthy these portrayals are? The performers involved give wonderful intensity to their roles, but also show glimmers of other possible readings. What to make, for instance, of a particularly devastating shot-reverse-shot at the film’s climax that shows Nina’s mother sitting teary-eyed in the audience? What is she thinking? I, for one, take this small moment, rich with overwhelming emotion, as the most indelible moment with which to contemplate just how dependable the film’s characterization really is. I haven’t yet made up my mind.

Aronofsky accentuates Nina’s growing madness with small touches of unnerving hallucinations that flicker to life in unexpected moments, sometimes bold and obvious, other times lingering in the shadows of peripheral vision. Doppelgangers flit through Nina’s field of vision. Danger seems to sit in wait around every corner. Leering strangers and intimidating pretenders alike gaze at her with creepy, unknowable intent. All the while, Clint Mansell’s kaleidoscopic Tchaikovsky-infused score swirls around, the frames are filled with mirrors, and the dark, evocative grains of the varied film stocks seem to reflect the increasingly cloudy thinking of our protagonist.

Fits of body horror both real and imagined grow in frequency. Nina scratches at rashes. She obsessively pushes her body to its limits, practicing a routine just once more and then again, and again, and again. She doesn’t just want to be perfect; she needs to be perfect. One particularly agonizing moment finds Nina picking away at a hangnail until her cuticle is covered in blood. She claws and claws until finally, terrifyingly, a thin ribbon of skin pulls up and away down the length of her finger.

Nina’s drive and madness congeal in a film that’s so confidently told with its declaratory sensationalism that it just barely covers up its messy, lurid, clammy, calculated insanity. I mean that as a compliment. This is a movie that grows progressively over the top in beautifully horrifying ways. Imagine the brutal, grueling realism of Aronofsky’s The Wrestler mixed with a bit of Cronenberg. This is a film of pounding sensations, a film of color and music and frenzied outbursts of sex and violence. It’s an intense experience, a horror film with a florid luridness and confident craziness.