Harry Lehman can still read a street. His problem is that the rewards for reading it have changed. An aging pickpocket in Noah Segan’s The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, Harry is increasingly likely to bring home a wallet whose contents can be canceled by the time he has looked through them. Segan has an engaging eye for the mismatch between a practiced skill and the small return it brings. A lesser version of the movie would take that change as an opportunity to lament the people who no longer carry cash. John Turturro gives it a more interesting consequence. Harry keeps paying attention.
Turturro is good at the relationship between confidence and quiet. An overcoat and a calm expression can give Harry an unremarkable reason to be in view. The work is in how much he can register without advertising his interest. It is a performance built around an ability to leave people alone until he has a precise reason to approach them. When the film moves into Harry’s domestic life, that ability has a different value. His wife Rosie needs attention that other people might mistake for surveillance if it came from anyone who knew her less well.
The opening’s use of LCD Soundsystem has the directness of a city love song that has had to leave room for a complaint. Harry’s intimacy with New York is more persuasive when it is allowed that sort of ambivalence. A location can be full of useful recollections and offer a disappointing return on an ordinary day. Segan’s interest in Harry’s dress and movements makes him belong to the street without giving him mastery over its changes. His competence survives as a way of going about the day. The city’s affection for him is a much less certain thing.
A valuable USB drive gives Harry a problem his eye for an opportunity cannot resolve. The objects he handles can circulate much further and more quickly than he does. A person in possession of one can have very little idea what it is worth or who believes it belongs to them. The crime plot gets a credible urgency from that unfamiliarity. Its risk is that making the object more consequential also makes the ordinary objects less important. Harry is most distinctive when it matters how a person’s habits bring something into his reach and what happens to the person after it leaves their hand.
The supporting players give the city a memory. Giancarlo Esposito’s Warren can see Harry in the terms of a relationship that predates the current trouble. Steve Buscemi’s Ben belongs to a small economy in which knowing a person can still count for something. Segan is good at letting the familiarity carry a certain weariness. A relationship that saves Harry time can also tell him how few people he would know to call if the familiar ones were gone. That feeling does more to establish the film’s New York than the title’s affectionate insistence that Harry is the last of a kind.
There is a similar advantage in giving the illicit business somewhere small to go. A conversation with a person who knows how things used to work can imply a whole chain of other conversations, many of which no longer happen. Buscemi gets a useful melancholy out of recognizing what an object might be worth before appreciating the reach of the people who want it back. There is little triumph in the discovery that the thing one knows how to handle is still valuable. It only brings the vulnerable scale of the older business into view.
At eighty-eight minutes the picture can move briskly through its obligations. The choice serves the small pleasure of staying near Harry and leaves some of the people around him with thinner lives than the performance encourages us to imagine. The best passages let a person to whom he owes care take up a little more time than the genre requires. Segan understands that the stakes of a theft can be too large for a pickpocket. Turturro makes the size of Harry’s usual life worth knowing before the plot gives him cause to lose it.
