There’s a scene in Darren Aronofsky’s 2008 film The Wrestler in which the two leads, Mickey Rourke and Marisa Tomei, discuss the plot details of Mel Gibson’s brutal 2004 epic The Passion of the Christ. “It’s, like, so inspiring. They throw everything at Him,” says Tomei as a Pitbull song wafts in from the main floor of the strip club in which she’s employed. “Whips, arrows, rocks—just beat the living fuck out of Him for the whole two hours. And He just takes it.” Aronofsky has never been a particularly subtle filmmaker, and this—an obvious foreshadowing of the next few weeks of Randy the Ram’s lonely, doomed life—is no exception. The fact that Tomei’s character admires these feats of flagellation is also no surprise. There’s no modern filmmaker more obsessed with the epic, positively Biblical forms of fate, justice, and punishment available to a storyteller. Aronofsky’s films are grand, emphatic testaments to the sacrifice that accompanies both success and failure and the sad, confused lives we live as a result.
And, yes, that can be awfully exhausting. Ever since his 1998 breakout hit Pi, Aronofsky’s career has been defined by the question of whether all this pain and anguish (and the florid way in which it’s often conveyed) is a sign of brilliance or highfalutin hackery. My first experience with Aronofsky’s fractured worldview came with 2000’s Requiem for a Dream, a film introduced to me with the same wide-eyed reverence that all “sick” and “fucked up” drug movies are when you’re 15 years old. If nothing else, Requiem very much delivers on such a promise, pushing hard against the limits of good taste while implementing nearly every clever camera trick in the book, a fever dream for a stoned teenager in a dark basement. Even at the time of its release, critics seemed at odds as to whether they should admire or admonish the young director for his excess and ambition. “A love story between junkies and their fixes and between Aronofsky and his meticulousness,” wrote critic Wesley Morris at the time of the film’s release, going on to sum-up the film even more succinctly. “Beautifully unpleasant.”
Much of Aronofsky’s filmography can be contained in this two-word phrase. No other oeuvre can boast such a collection of ruthless, yet oddly mesmerizing, depredation as Aronofsky’s, his protagonists so thoroughly put through the ringer that they very rarely come out the other side at all. Take Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman), the spiralling ballerina at the center of 2010’s Black Swan. Just as Randy the Ram felt it necessary to risk his life for one more night in the spotlight, Nina is willing to transform her entire being for a chance to be the lead in the upcoming production of Swan Lake. But even if we begin the movie rooting for her, we quickly realize this sacrifice cannot be worth the obsession and submission required. Nina is sick, in both her heedless desire and her inability to keep track of the realities morphing themselves around her vision. In many ways, she’s a more evolved version of Ellen Burstyn’s delusional widow Sara Goldfarb in Requiem. “We got a winner!" shouts the studio audience in the funhouse mirror flickering away on Sara’s small TV set. But at what cost?
Sacrifice takes a more literal, terrible turn toward the end of 2017’s mother! when the film's titular matriarch (Jennifer Lawrence) is forced to offer her own child up to an angry horde in a scene that likely earned the film its rather impressive “F” cinema score. This is just the final injustice in a long line of torture Lawrence faces throughout the movie, almost always in service of her husband’s teetering ego. Fame and notoriety are front of mind here, as well, but this time exclusively focused on the pitiful nature of such a pursuit. It’s impossible to ignore the many layers of self-admonishment going on here, as nearly everything done by Javier Bardem’s manipulative character—an obvious stand-in for the writer/director—is in service of a vanity so thin and pathetic as to be useless in explaining away his many transgressions. The fable-like story, which takes place in a single home but tries to capture the terror and absurdity of the entire world, is less about personal sacrifice than what others are forced to sacrifice on behalf of their loved ones, whether they choose to or not.
There’s no modern filmmaker more obsessed with the epic, positively Biblical forms of fate, justice, and punishment available to a storyteller. Aronofsky’s films are grand, emphatic testaments to the sacrifice that accompanies both success and failure and the sad, confused lives we live as a result.
Black Swan and mother! also represent two sides of the coin for Aronofsky as a commercial director—the former marking his biggest hit both commercially and critically, the latter a massive flop. “Filmmakers who deal in the extreme naturally provoke extreme reactions,” wrote Leonard Maltin of Aronofsky. “At their worst, his films suggest that there’s a thin line between the hypnotic and the stupefying,” David Edelstein noted for New York Magazine. Both of these evaluations, to be clear, come as part of rave reviews for Black Swan, and yet critics cannot seem to resist couching their praise in an embedded mistrust of even their positive reactions to Aronofsky’s work.
This reached a fever pitch during the 2023 Academy Award race, which saw Brendan Fraser emerge as the leading contender for Best Actor for his role in The Whale, a movie practically designed to turn a number of people off. It’s not a film I dislike, by any stretch, but one so intent on luxuriating in its own discomfort that a rewatch can feel akin to the heart-wrenching self-flagellation meted out by its subject. It’s also, like so many of Aronofsky’s films, carrying the heavy weight of metaphor on its shoulders, treading a precarious middle ground between The Wrestler in its weepy sincerity and the allegorical fancy of mother!
Then there’s his attempt at the massive Lord of the Rings–style spectacle, Noah, which, in its way, tries to stuff every one of Aronofsky’s many obsessions into one of the oldest stories known to man. Noah (Russell Crowe) is, like so many of the director’s heroes, determined to bear the sins of the world, carrying out “the creator’s” vision no matter the personal toil it may take. While Noah marked the first time religion was quite so textual in his films, the influence of such mystical storytelling has always been clear. Pi, The Fountain, The Whale, and mother! also feel like parables meant to get at something grand and all-encompassing, even if sometimes we can’t quite arrive at exactly what that’s meant to be. The God of Aronofsky’s universes—of which there are many, taking many different forms—is never quite present but always felt. One might say like the director himself.
Which is why Caught Stealing is such an odd proposition. Throughout the lead-up to Aronofsky’s latest film, which seemed to sell audiences on the kind of pulpy NYC crime romp we’ve seen some hundred times, I couldn’t quite grasp how the story could end up being a Darren Aronofsky film. Say what you will of his hits and misses over the course of his nearly 30-year film career, but not one of his movies has ever felt anywhere close to generic. Where Caught Stealing falters, as it does intermittently, is in the moments when Aronofsky seems determined to weave the impossible threads of his own ambition with a story that resists such an act. Austin Butler’s Hank Thompson faces his share of hardships, sure, but dispensing such Job-ian levels of punishment in search of absolution is undercut a bit when the next scene features Bad Bunny, an extended riff on a black and white cookie, or a bit of Shabbos humor.
In truth, the best bits of the film are the least inherently Aronofskian. Zany, sexy irreverence has never really been his thing (neither, for that matter, have body-count tallying car chases and shootouts), but the less trauma-dragging Butler and company have to do within Caught Stealing, the better. I suspect it will stand out in Aronofsky’s filmography precisely for how little of a response it actually warrants. That’s not to say it’s bad, just surprisingly unremarkable, especially from a filmmaker who usually all but demands a reaction. “We wanted to make a punk movie and come at you,” Aronofsky once said of mother! But for all the punky aesthetics of Caught Stealing, it might just be his first film that finds him completely devoid of that instinct. FL
