A Comedy as Much as a Heist Flick, ‘Any Day Now’ Would Make a Good Double Feature With ‘Riff Raff’

It’s the rare gangster film that has at its center a painting by a 19th-century French artist, in this case Edouard Manet. “Chez Tortoni” (1875) is his portrait of an unknown Parisian man sitting at a cafe table drawing in a sketchbook. With a half-finished glass of beer at his side, he looks at us with a keen sense of concentration, the rakish tilt of his tophat being a perfect rhyme to the angle of his pencil. In typical Manet fashion, the canvas is as curt as it is incisive.One can’t help but wonder: Who’s looking at “Chez Tortoni” now? The Manet canvas was stolen from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990 along with a dozen other objects, including paintings by Rembrandt van Rijn, Edgar Degas, and Johannes Vermeer. All of these losses are dear, but the theft of “The Concert” (circa 1664) is particularly galling, as there are few enough Vermeers as it is — about three dozen. The so-called Sphinx of Delft wasn’t the most prolific of men.Eric Aronson’s “Any Day Now” begins with a title card explaining how “a Boston Museum was robbed of millions of dollars worth of art,” and then follows up with a quick disavowal that the events we are about to watch are anything close to the truth. Not soon thereafter we are faced with the seen-it-all mug of Marty Lyons (Paul Guilfoyle from the original “CSI” television series). Ensconced in front of a worn, white wall, Lyons is being interrogated by unseen interlocutors about a robbery. His demeanor is flip and combative. Marty has been here before.Cut to a scruffy young man sprinting through the back alleys of Boston, a chase that has him charging through a restaurant kitchen, out the back door, and straight into the arms of the hood he’s been trying to avoid. Our runner is Steve Baker (Taylor Gray), and he owes a sizable chunk of cash to the fiercely mustachioed Albert (Thomas Phillip O’Neill). Steve is an aspiring musician whose day job as a night watchman barely covers the bills, let alone a debt incurred through means that are dubious.Steve Gray in ‘Any Day Now.’ Via Falco InkDoes Steve enter Marty’s orbit or is it the other way around? Marty knows a lot about the younger man, to the point of seeming omniscient: He knows where Steve lives, who he’s crushing on, where his band is playing, and, especially, the particulars of his job. Marty has a fondness for the finer things in life, up to and including art. He’s keen on Rembrandt’s “Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee” — a painting that just happens to be in a collection that Steve has been employed to safeguard.Marty makes Steve an offer he can’t refuse: Play fast-and-loose with museum safety protocol to allow for the pilfering of art and, voila, your debts will be settled. “Any Day Now” is a comedy as much as it is a heist flick, so Marty’s well-oiled plan is creakier in practice than it is in theory. Among the complications encountered is a rival gang boss out to settle a grudge, the modest level of intelligence amongst Marty’s compatriots, and, not least, the hubris of a career bad guy.“Any Day Now” would make for a good double feature with “Riff Raff“: Both are loose-limbed ventures about low-lifes that make affable games of their genre limitations. Mr. Aronson’s film isn’t as punchy in its dialogue, but it benefits mightily from a proud localism — “this is a uniquely Boston story told by people who live there” — and an ending that is less sappy than one might fear. That, and we are reminded of just how necessary the standard pizza box is to the sustained enjoyment of the higher pleasures in life.

A Comedy as Much as a Heist Flick, ‘Any Day Now’ Would Make a Good Double Feature With ‘Riff Raff’

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