Ah, the Lovable Rogue. C’mon, they’re not such bad folks, right? Sure, they might lift a cell phone or abscond with a wallet on a busy train… but they would never hurt anyone. (1) They’ve usually got a charming sense of humor about the world! And maybe they’re doing it for a noble cause? I mean, it’s possible, right?
One of the longstanding arguments by those opposed to violence in cinema and video games is that such aggression is often depicted as “consequenceless” violence. You don’t see the ramifications of violent acts. Disabling injuries. Grieving relatives. Parentless kids.
Pickpockets aren’t sending anyone to the hospital, but stealing is stealing. The vast majority of these miscreants ain’t no Robin Hoods, either. It’s a line of work that tends to attract a rather amoral crowd. So it takes a bit of clever storytelling to turn a common-variety thief into a protagonist that an audience is rooting for, while also acknowledging that there is a price to be paid for a lifetime of brushing up against the law. Enter Mr. Harry Lehman.
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We first meet Harry (John Turturro) on a crowded NYC subway train, standing behind a wealthy businessman. Pfft. There goes Mr. Moneybags’ wallet, right into Harry’s jacket. However, in one of the film’s many salutes to the modern age, the joke’s on Harry. When he pulls out the victim’s wallet later that morning to pay for his breakfast, he’s mighty disappointed. No cash.
Harry lives in a small Bronx apartment with his catatonic wife Rosie (Karina Arroyave), and it’s clear that he loves her dearly. He reads to her, shuttles her back and forth to the local community center, and makes sure that her favorite opera music keeps her company while he roams the streets, perpetually looking for marks.
One night, that pigeon turns out to be Dylan (Will Price), and via a resourceful bit of sleight-of-hand, Harry gains access to Dylan’s vintage auto and swipes a duffel bag. He does a double-take in the subway station when he sees what’s inside: a gun. Whoa. The bag gets tossed in the trash at first opportunity, but Harry makes off with a huge wad of $100 bills from Dylan’s wallet, along with a strange silver card featuring a USB chip.
Dylan is a grade-A twentysomething jerk, but he’s not a garden-variety stooge — he’s “connected.” He quickly leans on folks in the area who have access to street cameras near his car, and via some sleuthing, figures out Harry’s identity and address on file. Only problem? He hasn’t lived there in years.
The next morning, Harry drops off his latest collection of stolen trinkets at a pawn shop operated by Ben (Steve Buscemi). Ben is nearly as clueless about technology as Harry is, and his relic of a computer can’t begin to access Dylan’s mysterious card. But the attempt does ping Dylan as to Ben’s location. When Harry next checks in with Ben after dropping off his pilfered electronics at a Chinese fence, the latter has been worked over by Dylan and his goons, and was forced to surrender Harry’s current address.
Harry returns home to find his bedridden wife surrounded by Dylan’s gang, and is quickly appraised of the score. He can’t save himself; he’s stolen from the Wrong Hombre. But he can still save his wife, if he manages to retrieve the card by 4 PM that day. What is on that card? The clock is ticking…
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* One would be hard-pressed to find a current actor who embodies New York City more than Turturro. The accent, the walk, the cagey intuition, it’s all here. I hadn’t seen Turturro since 2016’s The Night Of (2), where he played a bottom-feeder defense attorney exuding almost as much desperation as Pickpocket’s Harry. If he’d aged during the decade, I couldn’t tell — he looks as perpetually underslept as ever, with a low-grade anxiety born from worry about where his next meal was coming from.
* Age is a huge theme in Pickpocket. Harry still has a landline with a physical answering machine (3) — he can’t make sense of cellphones and continually mispronounces tech acronyms. Heck, even the soundtrack is a sly nod to his fish-out-of-water existence; he roams the streets to a jazzy funk mix lifted straight out of the 1970s.
Meanwhile, Harry’s friend Allan (Giancarlo Esposito) is in a similar boat as a veteran police detective, since his lack of usefulness involving cybercrime has relegated him to a backroom cubicle. (Friends with the law? How, you may ask? Harry moonlights as a bit of a snitch, offering up info on more serious felons.)
The coup d’ grace? In the film’s final act, Harry shares a limo ride with Dylan’s grandmom, Moira, played by none other than Jamie Lee Curtis. Even within the world of organized crime, she fears she’ll soon be put out to pasture.
Films like this often evoke a bit of nostalgia (4) for the past. The good ol’ days. But who benefited in that era? The criminals? It’s probably a good thing that businesses are much harder to shake down these days, right? Look up the state of NYC and its crime rate in the late ‘70s. There’s a reason that the idea of turning it into a maximum-security prison didn’t seem so far-fetched…
* Before the day is through, Harry, fearing his time on this Earth is limited, stops by the home of his estranged adult daughter Kelly (Tatiana Maslany). And there we have it. We may be hoping that this aging thief worms his way out of trouble, but writer/director Noah Segan doesn’t let Harry off the hook for his lifetime of larceny. Kelly refuses to let him inside, and tearfully gives him both barrels on her porch for spending nights in jail instead of supporting his family… ultimately abandoning her and her mom to poverty decades earlier. (5)
* The Only Living Pickpocket in New York clocks in at a lean 88 minutes, and it hums along with an energy reflective of its streets. Segan’s previous directing projects have involved the supernatural (Blood Relatives, Scare Package), but here he shows a real talent for storytelling amidst stripped-down aesthetics, while offering up some cognitive dissonance for the audience.
There are lots and lots and lots of films featuring criminals as protagonists (6). They run the gamut from the grandiose power exhibited by the Corleones in The Godfather, to the detached coolness of hitmen in The Killer and La Femme Nikita, to the tall tales spun by con men and grifters in House of Cards and Diggstown. These aren’t people clunking passersby over the head. There’s an art.
Harry doesn’t quite fall into any of those categories, but there’s still an art to his craft akin to what you might find at your friendly neighborhood magic lounge. And so we wind up pulling for him… until the curtain on his past is revealed, and we’re better able to take stock of the costs of his vocation in life. Is it enough of a cautionary tale to others? Harry crosses paths with a budding young pickpocket on the train near the end of the tale, and rather than serving as a Scared Straight example, he offers a few tips. What does that tell us about him?
(Will I think about Harry the next time I’m standing around on the El? Yes. Yes, I will.)
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(1) OK, Han Solo is one of most famous “lovable rogues” of all time, and he did kill lots of people — but they were all bad! And his smuggling was one step lower on the criminal food chain than stealing. As Davos Seaworth told the Iron Bank in Game of Thrones: “Well, strictly speaking, I didn't do the thieving. That would be the pirates. I just moved what they stole from one place to another.”
(2) The Night Of is one of the best investigative/legal serials I’ve seen. After watching poor Riz Ahmed’s Naz get exiled to Riker’s, I did a deep-dive for a week on reading about “surviving life in prison.”
(3) Um, as did I until 2021, when I got my very first smartphone. Yes, really. No, I’m not geriatric. Strange? Perhaps. But not elderly. In any event, I’m up to speed now — I scan QR codes with impunity!
(4) I’ll serve up some Don Draper here, while talking about Kodak’s new carousel: “Nostalgia - it’s delicate, but potent… In Greek nostalgia literally means ‘the pain from an old wound.’”
(5) As with all things, one doesn’t become an expert pickpocket overnight. And that learning curve comes at a price — there’s a reason he’s on a first-name basis with NYPD detectives.
(6) Fewer TV shows, though there are some notable ones, like The Sopranos. Probably because it’s tougher to keep that dissonance in check for an extended period of time without sensational characters and plotting.