By I find it fitting that the 50th anniversary screenings of JAWS bested THE ROSES and CAUGHT STEALING during the Labor Day Weekend box office. This is now, of course, a few weeks ago at the time of writing, but in reflecting on the latest films from established Hollywood names like Jay Roach and Darren Aronofsky, respectively, its funny to see serviceable enough future cable TV staples lose out to a classic that’s been in rotation with AMC, USA, TCM, HBO, etc. for several decades—as the dorm room poster saying goes, “everyone’s a gangsta until the real gangster arrives.”
If the TV rights for both THE ROSES and CAUGHT STEALING haven’t been secured yet, make no mistake that 15 years ago these would’ve been in some kind of regular rotation on your plasma flatscreen; workmanlike filmmaking by obvious professionals, the ultimate products never really emerge beyond the limited confines something you would take a nap to while it plays with advertisements in the background on a Sunday,
Let’s start with the future 2:00 p.m. pre-FRIENDS reruns TBS staple THE ROSES, Roach’s first film in six years and his first return to comedy since 2012’s THE CAMPAIGN. Structurally falling somewhere between Warren Adler’s 1981 book The War of the Roses and Danny DeVito’s 1989 adaptation, it focuses on the middle aged pettiness that comes with years of marriage and the subsequent fury of divorce. Like DeVito’s adaptation, we traverse years of the relationship, from the honeymoon stage to the career and family period to the last gasp of tolerance before the lawyers are called and the knives are (literally) drawn.
THE ROSES is, in some ways, an upgrade of DeVito’s often laborious original. Where THE WAR OF THE ROSES is neatly divided into two halves—the first seeing the marriage be built up, the second a full hour of HOME ALONE style insanity while Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner try and kill each other—Roach’s allows the arc of the relationship to breathe. Crucially, architect Theo (Benedict Cumberbatch) sees his career capsizing after a storm destroys the years-in-the-making naval history museum he’s designed, coinciding with chef Ivy’s (Olivia Coleman) restaurant beginning to take off as a viral sensation. As he goes from being the decorated breadwinner to a jobless stay-at-home dad, she becomes a growing entrepreneur and celebrity chef.
There’s plenty about THE ROSES to find technically satisfying, even if in its proficiency it never reaches the level of exciting. That role reversal, of Theo’s decline arriving at the same time as Ivy’s rise, is about as thoughtful an exploration of modern gender dynamics and parenting as you could hope—a kernel of an idea that never really lands in DeVito’s original. And Roach is doing his best Nancy Meyers impression here, both with regards to the story’s adult and economic framing, as well as the beautiful kitchens, the bright sunshine of Mendocino, CA, and the extravagantly rich white people problems. And while sometimes THE ROSES is funny, it’s often a strange mix of comedic stylings that never quite gel, as Roach juggles the dry Britishness of his leads, a pair of over-the-top SNL riffers in Andy Samberg and Kate McKinnon, source material that urges stakes and a violent silliness, and even his own sensibilities, which transplant early 2000s bits into an otherwise more mature comedy (the most bizarre of which is a throughline involving their kids becoming obsessed with working out).
When the rubber meets the road though, Roach’s script has kids gloves on. In WAR OF THE ROSES, DeVito finds the couple’s obsession with keeping the house in the divorce grotesque, an unsubtle understanding that when tempers flare we’re all just kids on the playground; even if their fight for it goes on for too long, there’s no denying that Douglas and Turner are passionate to a fault. The house is a sticking point that again is quite technically satisfying in THE ROSES given Theo’s background as an architect, but the two’s “war” is over almost as quickly as it begins—a quaint 20 minute finale of jabs that just unceremoniously ends. Perhaps the name change was in that way deliberate, but unfortunately to the American eye WAR can be fun to watch.
CAUGHT STEALING is similarly technically satisfying—and no doubt a more well-rounded picture than THE ROSES, though it’s perhaps too well-rounded. The future post-NBA ON TNT late night watch is operating on a few different levels: our best trial yet to see Austin Butler’s leading man chops, a temperature check on where Aronofsky sits as a commercial director these days, and a test for audiences on if a transparently derivative chopped and slopped mix of AFTER HOURS, Shane Black, Guy Ritchie, and the Coens could possibly have theatrical staying power in the year 2025.
We’ll take those ideas in order.
Butler, if there was any doubt, has the juice. His on screen chemistry with Zoë Kravitz, while cynically short-lived in the film (perhaps the most dour Aronofsky moments we get in an otherwise efficient Hollywood showing), is electric. There’s a level of both on-screen and off-screen charm that we haven’t seen since Clooney in the early 2000s—even if we can never fully believe that someone this singularly beautiful could be an everyman in real life, he can hit on enough levels that we’ll buy it in the movies every time. CAUGHT STEALING kicks the shit out of him both emotionally and physically, and his “aw shucks” brokenness plays every time.
What it is Aronofsky is trying to do with CAUGHT STEALING is a bit beyond me, but that could really be said of any director whose last decade included the rock-monster-focused Bible epic NOAH, the much discoursed MOTHER!, a nature documentary for the Sphere in Las Vegas, and 2022’s Oscar® Winner THE WHALE. Once a suspectly hailed auteur for psychologically thrilling depression porn, he entered a wilderness period right about the time it felt like critics were reassessing his body of work and maybe seeing the emperor never had any clothes on. No film makes me madder to think about than REQUIEM FOR A DREAM, a movie built to wedge inside my 14-year-old brain and slowly turn on it every year since: in film circles, that madness isn’t as rare as it used to be.
CAUGHT STEALING is, by the standards of his most intense movies, a walk along the beach—a fun blend of corrupt cop thriller, crime dramedy, and Fun City throwback. The dinginess of many of his other films reads well on camera in the form of ‘90s New York City, and Charlie Huston’s script is enough of a small scale crime film to give the world a lot of rich texture and characters (Action Bronson! Griffin Dunne! Bad Bunny!). It’s a shame the first hour is such a slog—a boring mix of establishing and then reestablishing Hank’s (Butler) traumas like giant breadcrumbs for us to parse out along the way but with very little forward momentum. Once the stakes get raised and we move away from the one square block of his apartment, the film finds a nice rhythm. At every turn, you’re ahead of where the movie is—at no point is there any decision made by any character that feels either revealing or surprising, but… Maybe that’s okay.
To call either THE ROSES or CAUGHT STEALING streaming fare would be to do them a great disservice, especially given both played great in the respective screenings I attended. But I do think there’s a kind of streaming malaise in effect, the sentiment that this type of studio storytelling was at one time understood as a theatrical experience in theory but in reality was experienced on airplanes or on Showtime and FX. Those movies have just transitioned in their cheapest form to Netflix or Amazon Prime or Hulu. Bring back the days where you’d simply never seen the first 20 minutes of either of these movies and only flipped to them between commercial breaks. You’ll feel right at home.
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