Movie review: The Outfit

Mark Rylance plays buttoned-up tailor Leonard Burling in The Outfit. Photo / Supplied

The Outfit (M, 105 mins)

Now streaming on Neon

Directed by Graham Moore

With a screenwriters strike in full swing in the US, writers protesting about lack of respect for their profession and the rise of AI, we can expect new Hollywood movies and TV series to be reduced to a trickle in a year’s time. This is good news for international movies, but there’s a risk Hollywood studios will be able to produce only reality TV shows in coming months.

This means that well-scripted, well-made movies like The Outfit may not be produced by Hollywood for the rest of 2023, and 2024 could be a dismal year for the US film industry. If negotiations break down, it could also mark the beginning of chatbot-generated screenplays — great for continuity and consistent speech patterns, but hopeless for anything a person might gasp at for its unpredictability. Let’s enjoy the real deal while we can.

The title The Outfit refers to both clothing and the mob. It was co-written by Graham Moore, his first film as a director. Moore won the Academy Award for his screenplay for The Imitation Game (2015), giving an inspirational acceptance speech, including these words: “When I was 16 years old, I tried to kill myself. Because I felt weird and I felt different and I felt like I did not belong. And now I’m standing here.”

Mark Rylance plays a weird, different, buttoned-up Englishman, a bespoke cutter called Leonard Burling, proud to have been trained on Savile Row, who finds himself thrown in with the mob in 1956 Chicago.

Rylance, last seen as Maurice Flitcroft in The Phantom of the Open (2021), and before that Stephen Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies (2015), brings his stage acting skills to the big screen in The Outfit.

Quietly gripping, the opening scenes show Leonard meticulously handling bolts of cloth in his tailor’s shop, measuring, marking and cutting with his special scissors. He’s a terrific character, deceptively modest, with an intriguing backstory that is only suggested, until the end.

Filmed during lockdown in London in March-April 2021, another time when the film industry’s survival was being tested, the film is set entirely in Leonard’s shop. Enter two of Leonard’s best clients, two of the mob, Francis (Johnny Flynn) and Richie (Dylan O’Brien). Elderly capo Roy Boyle (Simon Russell Beale) is Richie’s father, memorably showing a tough guy’s paternal soft side. Dylan’s girlfriend Mable (Zoey Deutch, in another of her fine performances, she’s one to watch) seems vulnerable but turns out to be a tough gal, as does the historically accurate French-speaking female head Violet (Nikki Amuka-Bird) of the opposing gang family, the La Fontaines. Everything and everyone has another side to them.

There’s a lot of The Outfit that’s like The Untouchables (1959 classic TV series). There’s the seedy Chicago setting, Leonard is reminiscent of Robert Stack’s Eliot Ness, there’s horrific gun violence, a glamorous girl at the heart of things, wistfulness that compensates for fairly depraved criminality, and the lurking FBI.

Suitably sinister, immaculately stylish, a bit too much about missing tapes, but overall good entertainment.

Recommended

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