Brooklyn-born John Turturro, who has been bringing award-worthy work to the screen for nearly 40 years without a single Oscar nomination, gives one of his finest performances in actor/director Noah Segan’s throwback tale of a throwback criminal facing the end of the road.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Segan is familiar with Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket, pretty much the daddy of the genre, though his film has more of a full-color, Jerry Schatzberg-in-the-1970s feel.
The Only Living Pickpocket in New York opens to the strains of LCD Soundsystem’s plaintive lament “New York, I Love You, but You’re Bringing Me Down” before introducing Turturro’s Harry Lehman, a full-time pickpocket of long standing.
Each day, Harry, whose name appears to be a nod to James Coburn’s thief in yet another crime caper, Harry in Your Pocket, looks after his wife, Rosie (Karina Arroyave), who is largely catatonic, and fills the pockets of his long, tweedy coat with wallets and watches to bring to Ben (Steve Buscemi), a pawn shop owner and former running buddy, with whom he splits the proceeds. They’re analog guys in a digital world who profit off the misfortune of others, but they aren’t dangerous like the mobbed-up Dylan (Will Price), who becomes Harry’s latest mark.
While Dylan is carousing with his posse, Harry lifts the gym bag from his car. He keeps the fancy watch and USB card, tosses the gun, and goes on his way, except Dylan identifies him through surveillance footage, putting a target on his back. Even worse, he and his thug pals take aim at Harry’s friends and relatives, like Ben and Rosie, to get to him and the mystery card.
When it comes to work, Harry keeps things on the down low, but he’s sociable otherwise, and he even counts a cop, Det. Allan Warren (Giancarlo Esposito), among his social circle. They’re on opposite sides of the law, and they aren’t exactly friends, but it’s about two “oldheads” who respect one another’s expertise. It’s also about the fact that they’re lifelong New Yorkers.
I mean, it’s right there in the title. This is a New York film to its bones, and the actors go way back, not least since Turturro and Esposito appeared in several Spike Lee films, and they have the kind of chemistry that’s hard to fake. Harry and Allan are also relics, like Ben (played by another native New Yorker), of a time when most city dwellers carried cash and wore watches.
When the thugs catch up to Harry, they threaten to destroy everything he holds dear unless he can retrieve the USB card, or “joint,” as Dylan calls it, so the film becomes a race against time since the card went on a journey after Ben realized his computer was too old to get it to work.
Harry’s own journey takes him from the NYPD’s organized crime division to the Chinese underground—including a hilariously grumpy granny (Orange Is the New Black’s Lori Tan Chinn)—to a street hustler (played by John’s cousin, Aida Turturro) to Jamie Lee Curtis’s Mob Boss. This isn’t one of the “love letter to New York” films in which everyone has a hidden heart of gold, though Sam Levy’s cinematography does bring out the best in all five boroughs. No, Harry tangles with some real assholes, and Dylan, especially, is a total sniveling piece of shit.
The film loses some steam in the second half as it starts to play like a lost episode of The Sopranos, a show on which a few of these actors appeared. It’s at its best as a hangout film whenever Harry gets together with Ben or Allan and even when he’s alone with Rosie, who can only watch as he busts a move to Odyssey’s disco hit “Native New Yorker,” in which Turturro, who once directed the musical Romance & Cigarettes, proves he’s one hell of a dancer.
Though Harry has done harmful things, he’s essentially likable and sympathetic. Segan’s screenplay doesn’t explain why he turned to a life of crime, but he’s paid for it in terms of the safety, security, and familial relationships he’s squandered for the short-term thrill of the lift.
Not until the film was over did I realize that Harry’s name is also a reference to Gene Hackman’s surveillance expert Harry Caul in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation. The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, whose title references the Simon and Garfunkel ballad “The Only Living Boy in New York City,” hits some of the same notes, and hits them exceptionally well.
Unlike too many films these days, it doesn’t move too quickly or waste time with unnecessary exposition. If anything, I would have liked to spend more time with three of America’s most valuable character actors all in one place, especially the heartbreaker at the center of the story.
