Crime doesn’t pay the way it used to. At least, that’s the case for the old school petty thieves who would thrive on a practiced trade, deploying sleight of hand to rip off unsuspecting subway passengers. Who carries cash these days, anyway? Gold watches have been replaced with the smart kind, and the electronics one could lift out of a pocket are GPS-enabled, easy to track and therefore hard to pawn off on a fence uptown. Nowadays, the dirty money is online and for the taking of a new, nerdier class of criminal that could explain what it means to be “non-fungible” but lacks the rough-hewn, romantic edge that animates crime fiction.
In Noah Segan’s slinky, elegiac neo-noir The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, Harry (John Turturro) is still plying his Bressonian trade in a world that’s left him behind. Living now in the Bronx after years in Manhattan, the pickpocket gets by on the old ways, selling his takes to his pawn shop-operating friend (Steve Buscemi) while taking care of his completely paralyzed wife at home. Harry’s relationship to technology is (nearly unbelievably) that of a caveman freshly chiseled out of the ice and thrust into the modern world; he doesn’t understand any of it and would rather not use anything newer than a flip phone. He’s the type of guy who would call a DVD a “tape.”
So it follows he’s got no idea what he’s looking at when he jacks a duffel bag out of some rich kid’s classic car and finds, mixed in with the nice sneakers and the handgun, something that looks like a credit card but transforms into a USB stick. Turns out, this is a cryptocurrency wallet holding nearly a million dollars belonging to a spoiled Ivy League brat gangster’s son (Will Price). When the kid’s crew catches up with him, however, Harry has already parted with the device and, under the threat of terrible violence against his wife, must travel across New York to recover it.
Segan’s film is short on action — there is almost no onscreen violence — but long on vibe. Instead of continually highlighting Harry’s skill as a pickpocket, he gets that out of the way early to focus on character study. Turturro does most of the heavy lifting here. A performer who has earned many accolades and more affection as a distinctly New York flavor of supporting actor, Turturro brings Harry to life casually but vividly. This is not an especially complicated character though, and a flaw in Segan’s approach is that there’s no twist to the theme. Even moments the film might play as a surprise, attempts at fleshing out Harry’s backstory, are borrowed from so many other films that they seem like an afterthought. Segan is comfortable paying homage, only differentiating his film through generation gap material that is only sometimes overbearing.
Even more important than the pickpocket is the city in which he lives. Segan and cinematographer Sam Levy take a pornographic approach to location shooting, treating New York City like a fetish object. More than highlight the distance Harry has to travel — after all, he does some of these trips multiple times per day — the spread out locales of the movie (mostly the outer boroughs and Chinatown) provide an opportunity to capture as many parts of the city as possible. The digital photography of the city also approximates a filmic look to warm, textured results. If there’s a magic trick the filmmakers pull it’s in collapsing the distance between their film and its inspirations. If not for the cell phones, it would be easy to forget Segan’s film takes place in the present day. Only from a remove, in a moment when New York is viewed from across the river, does the city look as modern as it is.
In navigating this past and present, creation and re-creation, The Only Living Pickpocket in New York is enjoyable but disposable, most successful in featuring strong work from nearly all parties, especially its cast of New York legends. Getting caught up in its melancholic, nostalgic vibe happens effortlessly, and the film maintains an easygoing nature even as its clock ticks down. Even the heist-style machinations put in motion in its final act remain nicely breezy. But it’s also always a shallow effort, ultimately achieving no more or less than acting as a pleasant reminder that New York is a great city and Turturro an actor worthy of it.
DIRECTOR: Noah Segan; CAST: John Turturro, Giancarlo Esposito, Will Price, Tatiana Maslany, Steve Buscemi; DISTRIBUTOR: Sony Pictures Classics; IN THEATERS: October 16; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 28 min.
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