John Turturro Makes an Old Crime Look Like Work
In The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, the patience that makes Harry Lehman a good thief also makes him the person his wife can depend on.
When Noah Segan introduces Harry Lehman, the man’s coat has already done a fair amount of work. It is recognizable enough to give John Turturro a clean silhouette and ordinary enough to belong to a person passing through New York on a day when the weather calls for it. Harry can be visible without having to explain his presence. Once you notice that advantage, it becomes easier to see what the actor is doing inside the coat. He gives Harry time to look without making the looking feel like an event. The film can move close to a thief while preserving the sense that the people around him would have little reason to do the same.
The Only Living Pickpocket in New York starts with a man whose work depends on recognizing when another person’s attention is about to go somewhere else. Segan has an interest in the skill, though the story gives Harry fewer and fewer reasons to expect the skill to pay him. People carry their money differently. A valuable object can circulate in a form that gives him little idea what he has taken. The movie knows how much a crime picture can get from that problem. Its quieter accomplishment comes when it asks what Harry still has to notice after he has left the street and gone home to his wife.
The look that never announces itself
A film can make a thief look clever by holding back information until the moment a theft is revealed. Segan gets more out of letting an encounter remain legible at an ordinary pace. Somebody has a reason to keep moving. Harry has time to recognize that the person’s interest has gone in another direction. Turturro rarely presents that recognition as a particularly exciting discovery. The work shows in how quickly Harry can return to looking like a person who merely happens to be nearby. The actor has to make an intention available to a camera and let it remain of little interest to the other people in the frame.
That is one respect in which he belongs beside Martin LaSalle in Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket. Bresson can make a theft legible by separating actions into small, sharply timed units. A hand moves, a person turns, an object passes. There is a precise relation between what each participant can see and what the sequence has made available to the audience. Turturro and Segan leave more room for the body that has to perform those acts to look like an unremarkable part of the surrounding city. Watching Harry means seeing someone repeat a skill while carrying the weight of the previous times he has used it.
The LCD Soundsystem song near the beginning supplies a recognizably ambivalent kind of city affection. It makes sense beside a film in which a neighborhood can be both dear to somebody and increasingly inconvenient to the life he makes there. A less interesting version would give Harry a great deal to say about who ruined New York. Turturro is especially effective when the change presents itself as a small professional disappointment. There is no reason to make a speech about a wallet that turns out to contain less of what he needs. Its owner probably has an easier day because he cannot use it.
Old friends are still part of the trade
Harry’s years on the street have given him a few people who know him well enough to listen when a problem sounds improbable. Ben, played by Steve Buscemi, has a position in the chain of exchanges that keeps Harry’s work viable. Giancarlo Esposito’s Warren has a different relation to the law and an acquaintance with Harry long enough to survive the professional distinction. Both actors understand the value of being able to start an exchange in the middle. A question can follow an established rhythm even when the people asking and answering have reason to worry about what the reply will require.
The stolen USB drive is a useful disturbance in those rhythms. It can have an enormous value to people Harry has never met and no discernible value he can establish by holding it. A man who knows the city has much less assurance about the world the object can travel through. The pursuit that follows is familiar, but the difference between Harry’s ability and the scale of the problem gives it some tenderness. His reliance on old friends is moving partly because the help they can offer still has a scale. Somebody may know him well enough to take a risk and be unable to tell him just how much of a risk the gesture will become.
Segan has an attractive economy with such people. The film need only show one exchange to suggest all the occasions when a less serious problem brought the pair together. It also means some figures are more vivid as evidence of Harry’s past than as people with a fully available present. The fast movement of the pursuit leaves room for a city of acquaintances and a smaller amount of time for the places those people go when they are no longer visible to Harry. That concentration serves Turturro, whose attention is often enough to make an ordinary pause feel as if it came out of a long friendship.
What Harry does when he gets home
Rosie gives the movie a reason to value a way of looking that would otherwise be useful principally to a thief. Harry has spent time learning what it looks like when a stranger’s attention is about to leave a particular object. At home he is interested in another person’s comfort, and familiarity gives him reasons to look before a request has been made. The resemblance between the two forms of attention is a quiet source of feeling. What changes is the purpose. A person with a practiced eye can use it to take something from somebody who will never know his name and to care for somebody who has had years to discover his habits.
The movie could have made Rosie an easy explanation for why Harry deserves sympathy. The more affecting material is in the ordinary time the characters have already spent together. If Harry makes a choice on her behalf, Turturro can put some uncertainty into it without treating every detail as a declaration of his goodness. An old relationship can have pleasure and irritation available even when one partner depends heavily on the other. The intimacy makes the risk introduced by the crime plot credible because the disrupted life has its own pattern. It would have had a reason to go on whether or not anyone had ever taken an interest in the drive.
The film’s late turns have the speed of a short crime picture collecting on the decisions it has set up. They also depend on the fact that Harry will have to continue being a person after the pursuit has established who can outrun whom. Segan understands that scale better than the affectionate sweep of the title might suggest. Harry can remain a practiced reader of the street as the material returns on that skill become more meager. What Turturro makes worth staying with is the amount of life a man can have in the attention he pays. There is a whole city in the short distance between a person Harry has marked and the person at home who knows what he looks like when he has finally stopped watching the door.
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