The Only Living Pickpocket in New York was originally envisioned by writer-director Noah Segan as a vehicle for the magician Ricky Jay. After the latter’s 2018 death, the long-gestating project switched gears and cast John Turturro in the title role. It would have been nice to see perennial supporting player Jay headline a movie, but it’s nice, too, to have fellow perennial supporting player Turturro not only give a movie its heartbeat, but also take a part, in a prolific career across which he’s been regularly typecast as off-putting eccentrics, requiring a quiet, melancholy soulfulness.
Turturro’s Harry scans as put-together and well-kempt, his salt-and-pepper hair neatly trimmed and his Italian greyhound frame warmed outdoors by a dapper flint-colored wool coat. But his elegance belies both his line of work and the reality of his personal life. The former is not so gentlemanly. Harry is a lifelong pickpocket, swiping wallets and other closely kept valuables with an illusionist’s flair the film should show us a little more of, if only for the illicit pleasure of watching sneaky-fingered thievery. Harry’s authority over his dishonest trade is at odds with his tragic helplessness within his Bronx home: his ill wife, Rosie (Karina Arroyave), is catatonic and necessitates around-the-clock care.
The Only Living Pickpocket in New York coalesces into something of a thriller; cinematographer Sam Levy shoots the eponymous setting with well-calibrated grit that makes it seem both merciless and like home. In a move that makes you wonder how many similar binds he’s knotted himself into over the years, Harry steals from an obnoxious young man (a weaselly Will Price) in possession of an über-valuable USB crypto wallet (something the aged Harry doesn’t recognize) and who also is a member of a local crime family. When his mark furiously tracks him down, Harry is made to do some life-or-death race against time-style maneuvering around the city to get back the measly-looking tech he’d thoughtlessly traded in.
John Turturro in The Only Living Pickpocket in New York. All photography courtesy of Sony Pictures.
The movie, though, never really quickens the heart, perhaps because of Harry’s own too-old-for-this resignation — he seems to have figured something like this would one day happen — or the plaintive, measured tone Segan introduces and doesn’t let slack. The aim is to patently make a crime thriller in the key of something like 1973’s The Friends of Eddie Coyle, where the trouble its weathered career-criminal main character gets in isn’t meant to be as compelling as the man himself.
The Only Living Pickpocket in New York embeds people from Harry’s life, both past and present, into the narrative to shade in some of his backstory: Steve Buscemi as the pawn shop owner he usually hands his purloined goods over to; Giancarlo Esposito as an old pal whose detective career has, we can tell, been helpful to Harry maintaining a normal-ish life; and a memorable Tatiana Maslany as his estranged daughter, who resents him for his risk-baiting unreliability during her childhood. But when they show up their presence has a whiff of contrived convenience. For a movie in part about the untenability of a life formed on top of spur-of-the-moment games of chance, The Only Living Pickpocket in New York feels too mannered and planned, its moments of chaos too controlled.
There’s sincere poignancy in Harry’s acceptance of his dire circumstances, and Segan makes Harry’s obsolescence — his practice is decidedly old-school and analog, driven by wads of cash people no longer so wantonly stash in their wallets— more broadly relevant as the world continues with its gung-ho adapt-or-die mutations. But The Only Living Pickpocket in New York reminded me of another fairly recent movie, A Love Song (2022), that seemed above all made to celebrate taken-for-granted character actors. These movies’ existences are heartening, but there’s also too much pressure put on their leads to fill in the script’s gaps. The Only Living Pickpocket in New York is neither a fulfilling character study nor genre piece; it knows its Turturro performance will carry it through no matter what. It isn’t wrong.
