In the Flesh: Thief

There’s a scene in Michael Mann’s Thief that has nothing to do with heists or lone wolf bravado or organized crime, which has no relation to D quality emerald cut diamonds or high-powered acetylene torches. In it, professional thief Frank (James Caan) and diner cashier Jessie (Tuesday Weld) transition from arguing in a near-empty restaurant about Frank’s bad manners and his lateness for their date to spilling their painful and unglamorous life stories to each other. It’s this moment which sets the stakes for the entire film, a tightly wound piece of clockwork which even as it delves into addiction, penal rape, and sterility moves as smoothly as a pat of butter sliding across a hot griddle. Caan’s vulnerability as he recounts the worst struggles of his eleven-year incarceration is an astonishing showcase for the actor’s ability to project toughness and a broken, fragile quality at once. “...they jump all over me, and do a lot of things,” he says of the night a gang of guards and inmates brutally gang-raped him. In a later scene, when shouting at an adoption agent about his childhood as a ward of the state, his voice cracks, and you realize just how and why he can compartmentalize like that.

Thief is made up of just such jagged little pieces, shards of irreparably broken lives glued back together not to recreate a whole, but to cover the emptiness beneath. Even Frank’s vision of his future is collage, idealized clippings of childhood, love, and family ironed and glossed into something powerful but never quite cohesive. It’s rare for a film to so much as allude to men’s experiences of rape, but Thief builds itself around that jagged, fuming fault line. How else would you explain Frank, a man so intensely and single-mindedly driven to put the predetermined pieces of his future together, a macho New Yorker open and willing in his own backward way to adopt a child of color. “No one wants older kids,” he says in the aforementioned adoption agent argument. “You got a black eight year old? We’ll take him.” Frank knows what it means to be unwanted, what it means to live past your expiration date, and in spite of all his selfishness and pig-headed brutality, he refuses to replicate the abandonment perpetrated against him.

It’s Frank’s intimate wounds which elevate Thief above so many “cool” heist flicks, which make sense of its protagonist’s near-superhuman focus and rigid principles. He isn’t stealing just to get rich, but to take back in some way the time of which prison robbed him. Eleven years beyond recovery, and thus a flat-out sprint to get him to where he should have been, to the American Dream, that simultaneously grandiose and blinkered thing. The world hit Frank, hit him hard for the crime of stealing forty dollars, and unlike so many other cool and ingenious protagonists, his smarts and aptitude for violence weren’t enough to stop him taking it right on the chin. He was raped. By his guardians in the foster system, by the penal system, and by its enforcers. How do you explain a thief? Look at what’s been taken from him.