Old Man and the Thief:THE ONLY LIVING PICKPOCKET IN NEW YORK

The dapper gentleman on the subway is looking to pick your pocket. You’d never know it to look at him, all buttoned up in his neat overcoat, an air of aged wisdom in his dark eyes and salt-and-pepper hair. That’s the point. You might not even notice as he brushes past a Wall Street guy that he’s left with the guy’s watch. That’s the goal. There’s something simple and honest about the elder thief in writer-director Noah Segan’s humble drama The Only Living Pickpocket in New York. He’s just taking a little to keep him afloat to the next score. He’s not running a big racket or working for a crime family. He’s just scraping by. The sense of the elegiac is there from the title. We used to have a kind of classy criminal, the movie seems to say, as John Turturro brings a weary dignity to the lead. Sure, he’s lifting your wallet or your phone. But he keeps it painless, and uses his money to subsidize his tiny apartment, care for his comatose wife, and keep him in trips from borough to borough on public transit. He’s Hemingway’s Old Man as a neat thief, doing just enough to get by in a world that's passing him by. 

Contrast that with the inciting incident, which brings Turturro into contact with a slimy mobbed-up tech bro (Will Price). The old man picked the wrong pocket, and now the young guy is desperate to get his crypto USB back. Who’s the real thief in this matchup?, the movie slyly inquires. The younger guy has flunkies, greed, and a sense of callous entitlement. It’s all transactional, even family. The older man has a small tight-knight group of fellow aging New Yorkers with which his way of life has kept him interacting over the decades. There’s an old-fashioned pawn store owner (Steve Buscemi) and a weary NYPD detective (Giancarlo Esposito). They complain about their aches and pains, and have a tired shorthand that we understand comes from decades of living parallel lives. Segan gives the movie a subtle sense of lived-in lives and well-worn spaces. The framing is simple, the places believable. The movie has a patience and care that allows for a low-key suspense in heist movie mechanics to play the background hum of a subtle character piece. Even the big confrontations turn smaller and sadder than you'd expect. Turturro leads with a warm, underplayed charisma that glimmers all the brighter as the darkness grows around him. The effect is subtle and accumulative, culminating in three perfectly chosen shots so simple and so moving that the film’s spell lingers well past its short running time.