My End of 2025 Catchups will still be ongoing well into the New Year, which is perfectly fine for me, as January looks to be the usual crop of mid-range horror movies and previous year stragglers. Today is what I like to call the Austin Butler Downer Double Feature, as both films are movies that had me feeling rather sad despite Austin Butler being on hand to try and liven things up. I suppose it’s a shortcoming of mine as a critic that depressing movies have to work much harder to convince me of their quality than goofy ones, and being presented with two films by notoriously grim directors was definitely a challenge. Can either of these depressing films by depressing filmmakers manage to get a thumbs up from yours truly? Let’s find out!!
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Caught Stealing
Caught Stealing is owned by Sony Pictures Releasing
Directed by Darren Aronofsky
Hank Thompson (Austin Butler) isn’t someone you’d look at twice if you passed him on the street. He’s a bartender in New York City, he has a crappy apartment in the Lower East Side, and his good looks and charming personality do just enough to cover for his obvious alcoholism. When his neighbor (Matt Smith) asks him to watch his cat one weekend, it seems like just another meaningless event in his meaningless life, but then gangsters start chasing after him, the cops get involved, and the few friends he has left in this world start getting mixed up in whatever mystery he finds himself at the center of. With few people to turn to and fewer clues as to what’s even going on, can Hank outrun this waking nightmare as faster than he did from his own dark past, or has the universe decided that now’s the time to pay the piper for all the ways he managed to screw up his life?
I probably should have known better than to expect a fun movie out of the most depressing filmmakers of our generation, but the trailers suckered me in with a silly premise and goofy characters in what looked like a lost Guy Ritchie joint, so I took the gamble on him lightening up for once. Sure enough, the finished product is undeniably an Aronofsky movie which means a lot of sad things happen, and frankly it was a real struggle to get through. What’s at least interesting about this movie, though also why it doesn’t work as well as some of his better films, is that he does seem to be trying to break outside his comfort zone with larger than life characters and the farcical plotting, but he’s simply ill-equipped for this kind of material and fails to merge it with his usual sensibilities. Someone like the aforementioned Guy Ritchie, or even Vince Gilligan, could have juggled the disparate parts of this story and wrangled them into something coherent, but they both have backgrounds in comedy which Aronofsky clearly does not. We flip wildly between tragedy and humor in a way that fails to take full advantage of either, with the darker elements feeling gratuitous and the lighter moments robbing our characters of any consistency or depth. Austin Butler, for all the charm and charisma he brings to this, can’t find a consistent emotional wavelength to explore because the script has him running from one plot point to another at breakneck speed. He’s given one scene to express his sadness over a bad thing happening before he’s back to spinning lies, crafting schemes, or cracking jokes, and while he’s good at all of those things, having him rush through it in such quick succession leaves him feeling rudderless and without much of an arc to go through. The script is based on a book which is always a double-edged sword for filmmakers, and I’m guessing the pacing between scenes worked much better on the page than trying to cram it all on screen, but even taking that into consideration, I still think the blame falls squarely on Aronofsky’s shoulders. I give the man credit for at least attempting to tell a few jokes and I think the narrative did cater to his sensibilities as a filmmaker, but he’s gonna need a little more practice before he can successfully make us laugh at a clown and then jab him in the throat to watch as the blood slowly pools around the floor.
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Eddington
Eddington is owned by A24
Directed by Ari Aster
In the small town of Eddington Arizona, a local sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) is starting to butt heads with the mayor (Pedro Pascal) and the state government over how they’re treating the COVID-19 Pandemic which includes mask mandates, social distancing, and stay at home orders which leaves him dealing with his overbearing mother-in-law (Deirdre O’Connell) who has fallen down all the conspiratorial rabbit holes, and his troubled wife (Emma Stone) who can barely function and only seems to come alive when she watches YouTube videos from a handsome vlogger and cult leader (Austin Butler). Needless to say, that things aren’t going well for him either professionally or personally, and when the state-wide mask mandate leads to a confrontation at a local grocery store, our sheriff decides it’s time to run for mayor himself and save his town from the world outside of it. Of course, this proves to be a Sisyphean task as everything keeps changing faster than he can keep up with, and the town starts to strain under the weight of the Pandemic, political unrest, racial injustice, and the threat of terrorism as social media can turn the smallest of molehills into the biggest of mountains. Will Eddington survive everything that’s changing around it, or is the rot coming from within its own borders?
This one I went into with even less awareness than Caught Stealing, as I didn’t even know it was an Ari Aster film until a ways into it. I haven’t seen one of his movies since Hereditary, and there is a reason that I have avoided them up until now, with this movie, once again, proving that I can’t exactly be objective about a film when it works this hard to be off-putting. It’s not the usual kind of reactionary jabbing at sensitive topics that usually keeps me from engaging with certain films anymore, and those tend to woefully made on top of being insufferable, which is not a criticism I can levy at Mr. Aster. By any reasonable metric, the guy has a great eye for cinematography and for getting dark performances out of his actors, but Hereditary just felt like an unending parade of misery, and this feels even worse because he’s also now extremely smug and pretentious. COVID-19, masking hysteria, left-of-center protests, there’s not a subject that was relevant five years ago that Ari doesn’t stick his aloof and detached nose into with all the grace and subtlety of a guy who wrote his thesis on the political relevance of South Park. What bugs me about movies like this is how much effort goes into looking and feeling like something with a lot of important messages, and yet that effort is absent from the messages itself. Critically incurious about anything; the movie never asks why people feel the way they do about certain subjects, and just assumes that we’re all too broken to live with one another. It’d be one thing if everyone who expressed obnoxious, toxic, or even whiney talking points had significant depth, but you can tell just how incurious Ari Aster was when he was cobbling this together; a textbook example of Internet-Brainrot where everyone has grievances but no one has depth; the culmination of hundreds of years of political, economic, and racial pressures summed up in mean tweets and broken windows. It’s not without merits, and there are glimpses of a phenomenal movie peppered throughout; particularly when it lets the social commentary stick to the background and lets the characters be the ones driving the story. Sadly, we don’t get nearly enough Pedro Pascal, who feels like he has the best handle on what Ari is trying to say, but Joaquin Phoenix does put in an admirably layered performance as a scared bully and frustrated man-child with a little more power than he can handle. We follow him for most of the movie and there’s a point in his story where it almost feels like Ari is starting to understand the topics he’s discussing instead of just using them to show how unafraid he is ticking people off, but then it all devolves into a ludicrous fever dream that seems designed to catch headlines but doesn’t actually mean anything. Still, it was at least kinda funny to see him go completely off the deep end, ironically, sincerely, or otherwise, and it’s got enough good filmmaking to keep it from being a terrible movie. Perhaps time and distance will give this one a certain cult appeal, much like how Red Dawn seems rather quaint today and its director became the basis for one of the Coen Brothers’ most iconic and hilarious characters. The best it will get from me today, however, is a short golf clap and an eye-roll.
The Reviewers Unite 