John Turturro gets the role of a lifetime and gives a crowning performance in “The Only Living Pickpocket in New York”
Sometimes, the laws of the lawless are more honest, honorable and severe than those that bind the mainstream. “The Only Living Pickpocket in New York” captures this dynamic through a small, character-driven drama centered on Harry (John Turturro), a semi-successful pickpocket in New York who hasn’t got the memo that no one carries cash in their wallets anymore and who abhors cellphones. Should he boost one, he’s immediately confounded by it and near always, tosses the device into the nearest trash bin.
The film draws heavily on throwbacks without ever feeling cliched or borrowed, a rare accomplishment. The central theme of a man out of touch and out of time has been done many a time before on screen but few directed with the tenderness and fury of Noah Segan. It stands with “The Wild Bunch” (1969), Sam Peckinpah’s elegiac framing of the fading west, or “The Friends of Eddie Coyle” (1974), where Robert Mitchum’s small-time Boston hood has his fate sealed but is too naïve to know it. Like those films, “Pickpocket” shows us how living and operating outside the law comes with freedoms, quick riches — and unmitigable consequences.
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