Zoey Deutch and Mark Rylance in The Outfit.Nick Wall/Courtesy of Focus Features
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The Outfit
Directed by Graham Moore
Written by Graham Moore and Johnathan McClain
Starring Mark Rylance, Zoey Deutch and Johnny Flynn
Classification R; 105 minutes
Opens in theatres March 18
Critic’s Pick
The Outfit is not, strictly speaking, a movie about magic. Yet the gangland thriller pulls off a number of nifty tricks, with first-time director Graham Moore playing his hand with equal parts sleight and might.
Shot during the height of the pandemic, The Outfit is a single-location, handful-of-characters production – yet it never feels like a film limited or dampened by COVID-era restrictions. Featuring little pyrotechnics and lots of handsome dialogue, The Outfit plays like a zippy adaptation of an acclaimed stage play – yet it is in fact an entirely original-to-the-screen work. And starring the wonderful Mark Rylance, The Outfit arrives as a late-career star vehicle of sorts for the oft-supporting player – yet the British actor is matched scene for scene by his various, lesser-known co-stars.
The film is a late-career star vehicle of sorts for Rylance, who often plays a supporting character.Nick Wall/Courtesy of Focus Features
Each of these surprises, magic acts in miniature, adds up to a wry and satisfying caper that might just make The Outfit the most pleasant distraction of this young and cursed year … were it not for Moore’s decision-making come his film’s final three minutes. But let’s not skip ahead quite yet.
Set in 1956 Chicago, The Outfit opens in the small workshop and storefront of Leonard (Rylance), a master suit “cutter” – not a tailor, as he reminds everyone – who uses the same skills he learned on London’s Savile Row to now dress mobsters. Leonard is a quiet man who wants no trouble, perfectly content with plying his trade while gangsters enter his space to make their weekly cash drops. Not so keen on the criminal activity is Leonard’s assistant/secretary Mable (Zoey Deutch), but she doesn’t have much ground to stand on, considering the eyes she makes at the ne’er-do-well son (Dylan O’Brien) of the local mob kingpin who keeps popping by.
Leonard’s long days start and end the same – with precision, and care – until one night gangland warfare breaks out, putting his shop at the centre of a bloody beef. Can Chicago’s finest cutter match wits with its finest killers? Can Mable help her boss, if it means going against the boss of the city? And when will Leonard possibly find time to finish stitching together his latest suit when he has to suture his way out of a quadruple criminal cross?
The Outfit plays like a zippy adaptation of an acclaimed stage play – yet it is in fact an entirely original-to-the-screen work.Nick Wall/Courtesy of Focus Features
Moore, who broke through with his screenplay for The Imitation Game, delivers answers to all of the above queries with quick, brutal, witty precision. There is an old-fashioned sensibility to The Outfit that is both reassuring and refreshing, like taking a sip of the coldest water from the comfort of Leonard’s most weathered leather armchair. Initially, Leonard’s shop seems too much of an itchy, claustrophobic setting for an entire film – yet as more rogue elements walk through its doors, and more bodies pile up in its corners, the space becomes a welcoming home for entertaining deviancy.
It might have all become too worn and torn if anyone but Rylance was at the film’s centre – he is the charming and clever type who you can, and should, never take your eyes off. But the actors surrounding Rylance keep us on our wing-tipped toes, too, including Deutch, O’Brien and a detestably smooth Johnny Flynn as an up-and-coming sociopath.
The whole Outfit might have fit perfectly if it weren’t for those final minutes, moments that left me aghast in half-impressed wonder. Not so much at what Moore pulled off, but rather in wonder as to how he convinced Rylance to participate in such head-slapping hooey. Yes: hooey! That is how ridiculous things get. But ultimately, the finale is but a minor stain on The Outfit’s otherwise spotless presentation. Filmmaking is a tricky thing to size up, after all – writing an ending that fits even trickier.
Barry Hertz