Film Review: “The Outfit” – (The Cutter’s Way)
By Ed Symkus
A subtle, elegant noir mobster film that maintains an aura of tranquility — until the violence begins.
The Outfit, directed by Graham Moore, is screening at Boston Common 19, Capitol Theatre, and Kendall Square Cinema.
Throughout this unhurried, subtle, and elegant period piece — the year is 1956 — set in the back streets of Chicago, viewers are given many choices regarding where to train their attention. It could be on the production design of the cramped but comfortable tailor shop where the entire story takes place. How about the constant parade of shadowy but well-dressed men who enter the shop daily and say nothing but drop off medium-sized envelopes in a wall-mounted lockbox? And how about that unremitting air of foreboding? Or the quiet, yet tense passages of dialogue between people who you’d think you would never meet, let alone eavesdrop on their long-winded conversations?
Here’s a suggestion. Take in all of that, but focus on the protagonist — the relaxed, polite, twinkly eyed, ever-smiling Leonard Burling (Mark Rylance). Listen carefully to his singsong voice explaining the complexities of making a suit by hand, examine his hands in closeup, lovingly measuring and cutting fabric. Admire how he fits together tasteful but conservative suits in his shop L. Burling, Bespoke.
Rylance had a long stage career in England before crossing over to film. American audiences began paying attention when he played historical characters — Rudolf Abel in Bridge of Spies, William Kunstler in The Trial of the Chicago 7 — and unusual ones — Halliday in Ready Player One, Peter Isherwell in Don’t Look Up.
In The Outfit Rylance revels in the dignified leading man mode, choosing an enigmatic approach to characterization. We don’t know why he looks the other way — in fact, doesn’t even react — when the silent men visit his shop. There’s no explanation about the relationship between him and his sole employee, the prim bookkeeper Mable (Zoey Deutch), who longs to see the world. The small details the script offers up about Leonard are limited: he’s very good at and proud of what he does; he left his Savile Row shop in London when blue jeans, rather than sophisticated clothing, started becoming the way of the world. His prized possession is his pair of shears and he doesn’t like being called a tailor. He prefers the term “cutter.”
Rylance’s performance may be the highlight of The Outfit, but everyone and pretty much everything around him is also remarkable, from the slowly unfolding plot to the cast of mostly suspicious ne’er-do-wells.
The plot involves a late-night visit to the shop by Richie and Francis (Dylan O’Brien and Johnny Flynn), the gangsters who come by daily to pick up those “special” envelopes. This time, things are different. They’re carrying a briefcase that contains some incriminating information about their gang and its boss, who happens to be Richie’s father Roy (Simon Russell Beale). That information needs to be delivered to Roy before the wrong people see it. But there’s a problem: along the way Richie and Francis have been ambushed by a rival gang, and Richie is bleeding badly.
“You’re a tailor,” says the gun-toting petty thug Francis to Leonard. “Sew him up!”
That line marks a turning point, demarcating where the film shifts from unassuming character study to noir thriller. Yet it manages to maintain its serene atmosphere. Some characters vanish (for a while), others arrive, others meet nasty fates.
You’ll get an idea of where the film is going when Leonard manages to get some time alone with Richie and with Francis. He starts playing subtly penetrating head games. Each guy quickly becomes suspicious of the other. But my favorite two-hander scene is when Roy, a longtime customer of Leonard, enters the shop and opens up about an organization called The Outfit, revealing that it’s a national network of gangsters, started by Al Capone, and that he wants to be part of it. But he won’t if the information in that briefcase gets into the wrong hands. Leonard, too, gets to talking, showing Roy his shears, revealing that it’s the only thing he brought with him from London. Roy replies in kind, showing Leonard his favorite possession, his pistol. That, in the parlance of storytelling, is what’s called foreshadowing.
The plot keeps taking twists and turns. Complications lead to things becoming intense and then becoming a lot more intense, and an explosion of violence. You could say the The Outfit is about who is the smartest person in the room, or maybe just who is best at fooling everybody else. It’s certainly a class-act crime movie.
Ed Symkus is a Boston native and Emerson College graduate. He went to Woodstock, is a fan of Harry Crews, Sax Rohmer, and John Wyndham, and has visited the Outer Hebrides, the Lofoten Islands, Anglesey, Mykonos, the Azores, Catalina, Kangaroo Island, and the Isle of Capri with his wife Lisa.
Agreed. Ed’s Outfit review is spot on as Mark Rylance would say. One of the best movies of the last few years. Film noir as a period piece.