Film criticism · New York Hours
Film essay · Based on verified film materials, festival notes and published reporting; not a firsthand screening review.
New York has found ways to make even petty crime more efficient, but it has been less considerate to the people who perform it by hand. In Noah Segan’s The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, Harry Lehman, played by John Turturro, is a craftsman in an industry that no longer has much use for his craftsmanship. Credit cards can be cancelled. Cash is scarce. Every sidewalk seems to have a camera. The old pleasure of lifting a wallet has become a poor business model.
Harry is no romantic Robin Hood. He steals for money, and money is what he needs to care for Rosie, his severely disabled wife. Yet the film’s premise invites a peculiar sympathy. Harry belongs to a disreputable profession with standards, habits and a relationship to the city’s physical life. The technology that has made his work obsolete has not made New York more intimate or more forgiving.
Segan gives him the sort of late-career crisis that crime pictures have been furnishing for aging professionals for decades. Harry takes the wrong bag and becomes entangled with a valuable USB drive and a dangerous family. The object is important because it means almost nothing to him. In another period, a thief could judge his haul by the weight and texture of the wallet. Here the truly valuable thing is electronic, invisible and transferable.
Turturro is a particularly apt choice. Few actors are as good at suggesting that a man’s whole life is visible in the angle of his shoulders. Harry’s predicament needs someone who can be stubborn without looking foolish, wary without becoming inert. His dignity lies not in a refusal to acknowledge his circumstances but in the tiny rituals through which he maintains the idea of a self.
An old New York crime movie usually offers two cities: the one the hero navigates and the one rising around him, indifferent to his knowledge. This film revives that distinction in the age of electronic transactions. Harry can read people and streets. The trouble is that reading a street no longer tells you where the money has gone.
The supporting cast—Steve Buscemi, Giancarlo Esposito, Tatiana Maslany—promises different forms of New York survival. Each brings a history of playing people with private rules and unsteady prospects. Their presence makes the movie’s attachment to a bygone urban cinema feel less like costume than a conversation between generations of actors.
Still, nostalgia is a slippery criminal accomplice. A film can lament the disappearance of an older city while neglecting to mention who found that city difficult, dirty, dangerous or prohibitively expensive. Harry’s sentimental appeal depends on his being an unusually considerate thief. Most victims have never felt much warmth toward a hand disappearing into their coat pocket.
The more intriguing loss is not the decline of pickpocketing but the erosion of local competence. Harry knows how to do something difficult. The fact that his skill is illegal does not make its disappearance any less recognizable to anyone whose work has been replaced by a device or a procedure.
Segan’s story proposes a grimly funny inversion of the American dream. The old-fashioned thief is running out of opportunities because the world has modernized so efficiently. What remains valuable about him cannot be stored on a drive, and there is no market for it. A city may have no obligation to preserve every obsolete trade. It might, however, remember the people who practiced them.
Sources and film information: Film information · Additional background.
