Triple Threat: 'Caught Stealing,' 'Relay,' and 'The Alto Knights'
Plus, the reveal for November's Filmstack Challenge curator.
The other day I got a visit from the Writing Fairy, who graciously pointed out the following about the state of The Treatment’s trajectory:
“Not every film you want to review can fill its own 2000-3000 word post; a length you commit to on account of your once-per-week posting schedule.”
“If you’re limiting yourself to films released in the last 12 months so as to maintain your infiltration of Rotten Tomatoes, then four films a months is too sluggish a pace to hit all the movies you want.”
“You are doing so much more than film criticism right now — largely within the parameters of The Treatment and/or the Filmstack Community — so, really, four dedicated reviews a month is not only an unrealistic target, but also a far-from-ideal scenario.”
“Getting into the habit of compiling several film reviews in one post, then, is probably the ideal evolution for The Treatment. This way, you can:
Easily sweep your monthly RT quota while talking about even more films, to the point where you can afford to expand beyond films released within the last 12 months.
Free up your weekly bandwidth so as to commit to other areas in your life (Filmstackian and otherwise) while neither taking away from nor unhealthily metastasizing your output.
And at the end of the day, there will be nothing stopping you from committing to a 2000-3000 post on films that you feel deserve one.”
He made some pretty good points, and so I’m going to keep this in mind going forward. I’m quite fond — beyond my wildest dreams, in fact — of where freewheeling instinct has led me thus far, so let’s see what happens from here.
Anyway, let’s talk about some great movies. Stick around until the end to see who I picked for November’s Filmstack Challenge curator.
Caught Stealing
Caught Stealing is an old-school American blockbuster — replete with a movie star, sex appeal, violence, and a handful of chuckles — that, perhaps paradoxically, is about the inevitability of reality, in all its decolonized expanse.
What do I mean by this? Well, Hank (Austin Butler) lives in a bubble. His horizons don’t really go beyond his love of baseball, and he refuses to face responsibility for the death of his childhood friend Dale (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai). He may be a demonstrably kind-hearted, empathetic person1, but his defining trait is how he allows his world — and, by extension, himself — to stay small, and tries to hide from his dark history.
Put another way, Hank is an American.2
In Hank’s world, the police are the good guys, gentrification is something you see peripherally without feeling, the guys with the thick Eastern European accents are Ukrainian because Little Ukraine is around the corner, and you’re blissfully oblivious about the Russian mob’s presence in Little Ukraine.
Then along comes Russ (Matt Smith); the perfect candidate for popping Hank’s bubble. As a white, British punk rocker, Russ is both an OG colonizer and a disciple of the anti-establishment bible3. Put another way, Russ — as a cultural parable — resembles Hank enough to pre-emptively exist in the proximity of Hank’s bubble, but is also anarchic enough to disrupt it.
And disrupt the bubble Russ does, as he unwittingly ropes Hank into his affairs with New York’s criminal underbelly. Among those who end up taking aim at the newly-painted target on Hank’s back are Russians, Puerto Ricans, Hasidic Jews, and a corrupt cop — suddenly, Hank’s world is much bigger (and more diverse) than baseball.
A skeptic would finger-wag at the film’s conceivable implication that a more diverse city necessarily translates to a more violent and dangerous one. I would argue, however, that this would be to misunderstand the film’s commitment to Hank’s perspective here.
For Hank — who reflexively keeps his world small and subsequently allows his trauma to fester and boil — the eventual expansion of his world could only ever come in the form of a violent explosion. And make no mistake; that world will come — the world, you see, is as inevitable and undeniable as the diversity that comprises it.
And let’s also keep in mind that Hank is a stand-in for passive American nationalism, unlikely or unwilling to confront where he came from. America, of course, is a nation born of genocide and whose governance and machinations are inseparable from the sphere of crime4. Therefore, if Hank is to face that which is inevitable and undeniable about the world and about himself, that would naturally include the violence, corruption, and darkness that’s stitched into America’s birth and engine. The longer he hides from it, the louder it will have to get in order to break down Hank’s door, literally and figuratively.
It is absolutely, positively no coincidence that Dale — whose death, remember, is something Hank hides from — is portrayed by one of the most well-known Indigenous actors working today in D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai.
Notably, Hank’s first major instance of confronting his situation — namely, tipping off Colorado (Bad Bunny) about his encounter with the Jewish twins Lipa and Shmully (Liev Schreiber and Vincent D’Onofrio) — coincides with him finding momentary sanctuary in a Chinese bar.
By taking responsibility, Hank’s world expands safely.
Unfortunately, by this point, he had already tried to pass off his problem to Detective Roman (Regina King) and, as you’ll recall, tried to run away from the twins, both actions of which end up connecting to the death of Hank’s girlfriend Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz).
By avoiding responsibility, Hank’s world shrinks harmfully.
But the impact of Roman and the twins on Hank’s arc doesn’t end there. Throughout her screentime, Roman relentlessly attacks Hank’s bubble:
She challenges him on having played “real ball”
Remember that baseball is Hank’s main, very American personality trait.
She waxes about gentrification (both in general and her first-hand experiences with it); a phenomenon that’s not on Hank’s immediate radar.
And the revelation of her corruption especially serves as a rebuke of the reality that Hank unsuccessfully tries to confine himself to — the cops aren’t always the good guys.
Lipa and Shmully, meanwhile, directly involve him in Shabbat with their family in one of the most literal instances of Hank’s world being expanded, but it’s the final scene the three of them share together that holds the most nuance.
As Hank finishes striking a deal with the twins and proceeds to drive them back to their family home, he reveals that he also just wants to go home; an act of self-confinement and a rejection of the reality that’s been forced to violently call to him over the course of the film’s runtime.
In other words, he still hasn’t learned how to honour the reality that exists outside of his baseball-centric bubble; he’s still afraid of it.
The twins tell him that he’s never going to have a clear conscience — put another way, he can’t reseal the bubble — on account of having seen too much and killed too much, and they’re correct; Hank can’t erase the damage of the past, and in trying to do so, he allows his darkness, fear, and banality to control him and define him.
And it’s only when Hank finds out that Lipa and Shmully killed Yvonne that he finally takes control of his darkness by crashing the car at full throttle, killing the twins and echoing the same accident that killed Dale.
Remember that, moments ago, Hank hadn’t learned anything — his ontological toolbox still only consisted of a darkness that he hadn’t even picked up/taken ownership of. By mirroring the accident that killed Dale, then, he both acknowledges his darkness and gives himself permission to take control of it where he once did not.
In other words, he can now use the inherent, undeniable darkness in his past to remind him why he needs to grow beyond his bubble. America would be wise to do the same.
And wouldn’t you know it, the film ends with Hank having fled to Tulum, Mexico (i.e. leaving America) to “take care of himself." The television at the bar he visits is playing a baseball game, which he turns off before staring out at the ocean. Here, he finally moves on from his once-small world that was defined almost exclusively by his love for baseball, and embraces the diverse possibilities of this world symbolized by the ocean’s endlessness; an endlessness that frightened him back on Brighton Beach.
Relay
Warning: Spoilers to follow. Those of you who read me regularly know that I don’t take spoilers seriously, so it should be telling that I’m offering one for Relay.
Being able to follow or be entertained by a complex plot makes us feel good about ourselves. We’re cognitively matching a display of eminent capability, often extending to a protagonist who can physically navigate these complexities and is therefore more capable than us. But, since we’re also navigating the plot in our own way, we can feel validated by the protagonist’s capabilities by proxy.
But what I love so much about Relay — one such complex plot job, as was Black Bag before it — is the parallel that can be drawn between:
The value we mistakenly place on those complexities…
and how Ash (Riz Ahmed) regards the infrastructure of the world that he navigates.
Both of these things disregard the presence of emotion, and both (as in the film’s complexities and Ash’s approach to life) would also be utterly useless without it.
Because let’s not kid ourselves; the most intricate, intelligent, polished plots would crumble down to nothing if they didn’t arm themselves with a perspective rooted in human emotion or curiosity. We don’t genuinely respond to movies because of how smart they sound, but because of the care they put into their principles, which subsequently gives us a landing for our empathy and self-reflection.
In the case of Relay, those principles lie in the despondent banalities of the systems we’re thrust into, and what it means to fight them for the sake of human prosperity. This, of course, includes your own prosperity, which may or may not be at odds with how you fight.
The reason Ash is able to so deftly manipulate and navigate the cold machinations of our various institutions (the airport, the post office, etc.) is because he has rendered himself in the spirit of an institution. He has rules, he exploits loopholes and oversights, and — most crucially — he seals his identity for his protection, removing the element of recognizable humanity (and therefore vulnerability) from everyone involved. He games the system by becoming a system.
The tradeoff? He suffers from crippling loneliness.
Then along comes Sarah (Lily James), his latest client who he begins to develop a mutual emotional bond with; strong enough that he becomes willing to break his rules about walking away when she makes a critical mistake, just as his former Wall Street employers broke rules to abuse its customers. Such is the true, malleable fragility of these institutions that benefit from us not thinking about how much better the world could be if we simply willed our rules in the direction of humanism like Ash does. This is the world that Ash fights for to his emotional detriment.
But if Ash can just stave off the corrupt corporation’s goons that are targeting Sarah and successfully mediate the handoff, maybe this particular connection can blossom into freedom from his loneliness, right?
Well, no, because eventually we arrive at the plot twist: Sarah was the leader of the goons this whole time, and they’ve actually been targeting Ash so as to gain access to the documents of the previous whistleblower he had assisted.
Suddenly, the entire relationship between fight and purpose is reframed. Those of us who believed we were cheering for human connection at the end of this banal railroad slogged through by Ash against these corrupt institutions, suddenly realize that we weren’t actually regarding Sarah as a human, but as a prize.
Instead, the narrative win-state comes in the form of Wash, a police officer and Ash’s sponsor for Alcoholics Anonymous who brings a team of officers to rescue Ash from Sarah and the goons.
And throughout the film, Ash and Wash meet over coffee, have genuine and frank talks, and share a tender hug after Ash finally opens up in an AA meeting. These two have been in this together this whole time.
Wash turned to the bottle out of despair over the corruption of the world we inhabit (and, as a police officer, she obviously sees a lot of it in her professional ranks).
In other words, with Sarah, human connection was feigned as the goal of overcoming these systems, but with Wash, we’re given a hard slap of an assertion that human connection is the catalyst for overcoming these systems, rather than the reward.
Indeed, the hard practical fruits of isolation and self-preservation have their place, but they pose little threat to institutions that threaten our human sovereignty (and thereby force that isolated self-preservation) in the first place. Overcoming them will require us to work together, which can begin as simply as an unencrypted phone call to your friend Wash after you almost relapse at a bar.
Indeed, we can accomplish quite a bit by focusing on each other first and the institutions second, just as any film worth watching — like Relay — focuses on its human thrust before the puzzle of the plot.
The Alto Knights
The Rotten Tomatoes guard wasn’t particularly kind to The Alto Knights — a crime drama released back in March — per its 39% approval rating. I think this is because nobody seemed to clock that The Alto Knights is a satire.
The film stars Robert De Niro in a dual role, as mob bosses Frank Costello and Vito Genovese; two longtime friends who end up fighting for control over 1950s New York.
First and foremost, we must recognize that mob movies are — by their very nature, and even when they aren’t trying to be — satires of America, pulling back the curtain on the inseparability of politicians and police from the crime bosses they affiliate with, which by extension speaks to the inseparability of corruption and greed from America’s functionality.
“It’s all the same,” is the grand takeaway from the genre, and then The Alto Knights goes and casts the same actor for its two lead mob boss characters.
Frank Costello — as pointed out on the film’s poster — “brought about the downfall of the American Mafia.” The natural direction for a film about his escapades, then, would be satire; cinema’s choice tool for bringing about downfall.
And that’s before the movie even starts. From the opening scene onward, the film unceremoniously thwacks all the mob movie tropes — from the didactic voiceovers to strained marriages and livewire paranoia — not primarily for the sake of dramatic progression, but to load the genre bases so as to hit its deeply self-aware, satirical flyballs:
During the family court faceoff between Vito and his wife Anna, Anna screams about Vito being “an actor” multiple times.
When journalists come to investigate Vito’s (very normal-looking) home, Vito asks them if they were expecting to see armed gunman before remarking “You guys watch too many movies.”
When Vito is murdering Anna’s former husband, it’s intercut with instances of a mob movie that Frank and his wife Bobbie are watching, called “White Heat.”
Vito’s anger towards Vincent and his botched hit on Frank is decidedly comical in its intensity and relentlessness, echoing the emotional instability of so many movie mobsters (divas) before him.5
Following Frank’s court hearing that Vito and the other mob bosses watched together on television, they all delve into incessant yammering about what just transpired, all under the eye of a drifty, slightly shaky camera — a deviant lens that can no longer prevent itself from giggling at the friction between the trite vanity and inescapable uniformity of these men, all of it underscored by the cartoonish infrastructure of America’s politics and legal system.
Among the film’s more specific skewers are the Prohibition laws and the Fifth Amendment. It’s not specific about politicians and cops — the bulk of the aforementioned infrastructure — because the homogenous nature of the figures being examined (politicians, cops, mobsters) allows the film to skewer them by simply acknowledging said homogeneity.
It all leads up to the Apalachin meeting; a large-scale gathering of the Mafia’s highest-ranking members that Frank will tip off law enforcement about. The camera glides over an ocean of suits and fedoras — which will turn into a slapstick stampede upon the arrival of the cops — while cycling through shots of the same five or six license plates of the vehicles they all arrived in. It’s a deeply unserious crescendo that never strays from the “They’re all the same” sentiment that the film’s drama and satire is predicated upon.
Which brings me to my next point: there’s a sincere side to this sentiment as well. As mentioned earlier, Frank and Vito are childhood friends who end up on opposite sides of the New York gangland war. This — childhood friends on opposite sides of a conflict — is a common storytelling archetype, often-to-always grounded in the theme of how childhood friendship is born of youth’s simplicity, where personalities aren’t developed enough to show any major differences, only for wildly different sensibilities to emerge when age brings a more consequential world that these once-children, now-adults now have a responsibility to directly confront and interact with.
Both men are sentimental about this, Frank moreso, particularly when we find out in the epilogue that he and Vito wound up spending time in prison together and reminisced on their youth. “It was nice,” says Frank, observing the occasion with all the simplicity that he and Vito were once blessed with as children.
Earlier, on his way to the Apalachin meeting, Frank also remarks how Vito’s paranoia stems from Vito’s own propensity for violence and animosity — Vito commits to a reality of violence, and therefore assumes that everyone else wants for him what he wants for others.
Finally, also during the epilogue, Frank recalls how, when he and the other OG mobsters arrived in America from Italy, they were tasked with building something out of the corruption inherent to the politicians and police, who had by this point plundered the bulk of America’s other resources on the back and heels of their genocide of Indigenous people. Indeed, all that remained was a fixed haze of evil, and as the saying goes: “When you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
And so “They’re all the same” isn’t just the starting gun for The Alto Knights’ snickers; it’s also the tragedy — we’re all the same until we grow up and decide that we aren’t, unless you’re Vito, in which case everyone is only the same in the sense that people want to hurt him the way he hurts others. But then, when you inherit a world defined by despondency and corruption, how different can you even ultimately become from your fellow mobster?
And now, the curator for Filmstack Challenge #8!
Quick housekeeping note: If you haven’t responded to the challenge I issued yet, there’s still time!
Anyway, one of the most valuable currencies pocketed by us writers — and artists, more broadly — is the respect we receive from writers who we respect in turn. To that point, it’s meant quite a lot to me that this writer was one of my earliest supporters, not just because of how deftly he shares his insights and research, but also his commitment to the cultural principles that comprise the purpose of his newsletter. You never finish one of his posts without learning something new or tacking another title onto your watchlist.
Indeed, my pick for the next challenge is the Boss of the Lost, the Sultan of the Underseen, the Excavator of the Elusive, the Grand High Gatherer of Cinema’s Slipperiest Specimens…
Alex Rollins Berg, you’re up!
Per his altruistic handling of the dancers in the bar at the film’s outset, his familiarity/friendliness towards Jason, and his committed protection of Bud the cat.
You could just as easily substitute baseball for hockey and set this in Canada.
The American establishment, of course, holding many a stake in the smallness of the individual American, such as Hank.
Martin Scorsese built an entire career on this thesis.
Its comedic framework of subversion is surprisingly layered, too. He just keeps ranting on about the same point just when you think he’s finished, and he also suddenly segues into it again when he’s harping on Vincent about the origins of Mormons, right when you’re not expecting it.
My fav character in CAUGHT STEALING is New York itself, I thought it was cool how culturally rich it was. Maybe because I spend a lot of time around neurodivergent folks I read Hank’s motivations differently, he hasn’t processed his trauma, he’s full of anxiety that he drowns with liquor. I totally know ppl who keep such routines and rarely leave their neighborhood. He’s trying to play by the rules society told him and gets a very harsh real world lesson instead. NYC forces you to become a stronger more driven person, he was existing in stasis until trouble came a knocking.