Movie Review The Good Thief

The Good Thief (2003)

Directed by Neil Jordan 

Written by Neil Jordan 

Starring Nick Nolte, Ralph Fiennes

Release Date April 25th, 2003

Published November 11th, 2003 

You've seen heist movies. Heck, you've seen movies called The Heist. The genre is one of Hollywood's time honored sources of roguishly handsome con men and intricate storytelling. You know that old saying about how familiarity breeds contempt? Well a number of heist movies have bred a number of cliches and repetitious stories that have become shorthand for hack screenwriters. In this era, it takes a lot more than an intricately planned con to make an entertaining heist movie. The modern heist movie needs a little extra something to set itself apart from the genre pack.

In The Good Thief, that something is Nick Nolte in a career best performance. In The Good Thief, Nolte is Bob, a pathetic junkie gambler in some nameless French slum. Despite his weary, decrepit appearance, his reputation as a legendary thief persists in the mind of an obsessive French cop named Roger (Tcheky Karyo). After Bob saves Roger's life in a bar fight, the two share a drink and Roger senses something is up with the aging thief and begins tailing him.

Indeed Bob does have something going on, his drug addiction and gambling have emptied his bank account. A friend, Raoul (Gerard Darmon), has a line on a big score to get Bob back on his feet. In the meantime, Bob decides to help a young Russian girl who had come to France and was going to work as a prostitute until Bob saved her. The girl, Anne (Nutsa Kukhianidze), is 17 and obviously attracted to Bob who needs all his will power not to take advantage. Bob also has to overcome his drug addiction in order to pull off the big score.

The heist is no more clever than most heists in similar films. It involves an overly complicated security system and the theft of some classic works of art from Picasso, Degas and others. There are typical scenes of gathering a crew, narrowly avoiding the cops while manipulating them into the right position to work around them. And let us not forget the girl, who like every other girl in the heist movie, complicates things.

Director Neil Jordan gives all of this the polish of professionalism and a real love of French landscape, architecture and an extra special appreciation of the French slums, which he paints with the right mix of menace and “Frenchness.”

The Good Thief is a remake of the Jean Paul Melville film Bob Le Flambeur, the title is referenced in August Le Breton's updated screenplay as one of Nolte's many aliases. It's the type of subtle nudging humor that edges in throughout the film. Having never seen Melville's original, I can't compare the two. However, Le Breton seems to have a good sense of how to update the script, to modernize it without losing what made them want to remake The Good Thief in the first place.

As good as Jordan's direction and Le Breton's script update, The Good Thief belongs to star Nick Nolte. Put aside the tabloid trash that has dominated his recent press clippings and take a close look at Nolte the actor. His weary eyes and weathered face tell us more about the character than pages of dialogue ever could. That classic Nolte growl is tempered and toned to the dialogue that rolls out like a hand of cards. Nolte's Bob is constantly telling stories about his parents, his exploits and his career. His favorite is a story about meeting Pablo Picasso at a bullfight, I could listen to him tell it for hours.

Combining Nolte's awesome performance with some terrific source material and Jordan's steady directorial hand, you get one of the rare heist flicks that skates over its atypical genre and becomes a fascinating exercise in acting and dialogue.

Nolte deserves award consideration for this role. Whether it's eligible for this coming Oscar ceremony is in question, it debuted last year at the Toronto International Film Festival but didn't make its American debut until April of this year. Eligible or not, your chance to pay homage to his performance is now on DVD.