How do you make movies about a world you no longer live in? As artists grow older and more successful, should they be lucky enough to do both, they inevitably drift further and further away from the stuff of ordinary life, the environment that most of the people who made them successful still inhabit. It’s not so much of a problem if you make movies that take place on spaceships or in the distant past, but when the setting is meant to be familiar, the disjuncture between their universe and ours can be glaring.
Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest is nominally about a wealthy music producer (Denzel Washington) forced to decide whether it’s worth giving up his fortune to save the life of his oldest friend’s son. But it’s clear that what engages Lee is the opportunity to follow his protagonist through the streets of New York and catch up on the latest. Like Lee, Washington’s character is a legend in his field, surrounded by tributes to the trailblazers who inspired him; the Jean-Michel Basquiat painting paying homage to Charlie Parker’s “Now’s the Time” that hangs in Washington’s apartment is a copy from Lee’s personal art collection. But they’re all figures from before Washington, or Lee, was even born, and while his terrace offers a commanding view of Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn, it underlines that he lives in a literal tower, far above the people whose tastes he once shaped.
The hunt for the kidnapper, who turns out to be an up-and-coming rapper called Yung Felon (played by the up-and-comer ASAP Rocky), takes Washington’s David King all over the city, through packed subway cars and parade-clogged streets, and Lee happily follows him, all the way to an apartment numbered A24—Highest 2 Lowest’s theatrical distributor, and a sign that Lee has returned to his independent roots. The movie is too loose and too leisurely to play as the thriller it’s meant to; it’s a stroll through the old neighborhood, not a race against time. But that’s mainly because it overflows with the director’s love for the city he has always called home. For the movie’s Cannes premiere, he dressed up, head to toe, in Knicks colors, right down to a pair of blue-framed eyeglasses with orange rims. The only question was whether he had them made for the occasion or already owned a pair.
Darren Aronofsky is also Brooklyn born and raised, and his latest movie, Caught Stealing, is also a ticking-clock thriller that doubles as a paean to New York City. And like Lee’s movie, Aronofsky’s is styled as a return to his roots. The story of a down-and-out bartender (Austin Butler) who gets caught up in a deadly battle between Russian and Hasidic mobsters, the movie hurtles from the Lower East Side to Chinatown (where Aronofsky’s Pi was set) to Brighton Beach (where his follow-up, 2000’s Requiem for a Dream, takes place) to Flushing Meadows, taking in weddings and Shabbat dinners as it goes. But this isn’t the gentrified, tourist-friendly Manhattan of the present day. The movie, which is based on a novel of the same name by Charlie Huston, is set in the late 1990s, when recently reelected Mayor Rudy Giuliani was waging war on broken windows and the degradation of Times Square. In the movie’s first scene, Butler’s Hank pours a round of free shots for a group of college students in order to stop them from dancing in the back of his bar, lest they fall afoul of Giuliani’s attempt to subdue the city’s nightlife by using an arcane law to fine any establishment without a license allowing more than three people to move to music at once.
That’s about the last time Hank is able to stop anyone, or anything, from moving. When his mohawked neighbor, Russ (Matt Smith), goes out of town, Hank agrees to watch his cat for a few days. The task doesn’t thrill him, and he can barely take care of himself in the first place, but it does seem to make a favorable impression on his girlfriend Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz), who’s beginning to wonder if their relationship is ever going to start to get serious. But when Hank comes across a pair of Russian gangsters (Yuri Kolokolnikov and Nikita Kukushkin) knocking on his neighbor’s door, they beat him so savagely he loses a kidney, and soon he’s running from both them and two ruthless Hasids (Liev Schreiber and Vincent D’Onofrio) who seem to be after the same mysterious thing as the Russians.
As a high school baseball star whose career was derailed by a tragic car accident, Butler has the easy lope of a Northern California jock, and the vulnerable sincerity of a man who still calls his mother every day to discuss how the Giants are doing this season. But just as Hank is stuck mourning what might have been, Aronofsky has made a movie that’s resolutely mired in the past. It doesn’t seem accidental that he set his story in 1998, when Pi was released. It’s as if he’s looking back on the last time he could move through the world without being noticed, when he could close down the bars at 4 a.m. and wake up to a messy apartment and a swig of cold beer. It’s nostalgic for a time when Manhattan still had some grottiness left to clean up, but it also frames that seedy, dangerous time as a period you’re meant to pass through to get to something better, not a place anyone would want to stay.
Caught Stealing is a lot less messy and self-indulgent than Highest 2 Lowest. Aronofsky has his characters stroll by the old Kim’s Video marquee; Lee would have set an entire scene inside the store and lingered on a shot of his favorite rentals. But that efficiency comes at a cost. There’s nothing as exuberant as the moment Lee pauses his movie for a performance by the late salsa legend Eddie Palmieri, or breaks the fourth wall to let Red Sox fans know just what he thinks of them. Aronofsky’s New York is preserved behind glass, but Lee’s feels very much alive.
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