You know all those old gritty New York crime movies? The ones that show the city in all its 1970s grime and seedy glory? You like those, right? Of course you do, everyone does. But that New York isn’t really around anymore, and you can’t really make a movie like that these days without acknowledging how much things have changed.
Yeah, they were the “bad old days,” as John Turturro’s character says in The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, a movie that’s kind of an elegy for a New York—and a New York movie—that’s now part of the past, and a movie that faces the reality that time moves on, and we’re pulled along with it. Those were days when you’d get your nose bloodied every night in Times Square, but there’s also a romance about it, something that keeps drawing us back to that time and those films, and that keeps drawing Turturro’s character, Harry, to continue his life as a pickpocket and small-time thief, even in a world where a lot of people don’t carry cash anymore. To be fair, this does seem to be the only life he’s really known, and he is, or has been, incredibly good at it. But Harry’s committing analog crime in a digital age, and when he steals some important items from a mobbed-up college kid, the surveillance state we’ve created for ourselves makes it incredibly easy for the little jerk to figure out who Harry is and where to find him.
The movie does all the right things visually, with its quick zooms from across the street and edits that reveal the machinations of what’s essentially a slow-motion heist. And seeing Turturro with his now-graying hair, and an aging Steve Buscemi as his business associate, we can’t help but think of a particular kind of New York, even if all the streets we see are a whole lot cleaner. But to make it in a city like this, no matter when you live there, you’re going to need help from some friends, and Harry knows this, and he believes it, too. And so there’s also an unexpected amount of quiet emotion wrapped up in this crime thriller, although the word “thriller” may be a little too rambunctious for the movie’s tone. Things change… but some things don’t. We still need people. And that romance, the romance of New York, then and now, is real.
The Only Living Pickpocket in New York is in theaters.
