The Outfit (2022)
“If we all had angels as customers, we’d have no customers at all”
The Outfit is Graham Moore’s directorial film debut and one that had a stage play feel to it, centering as it does in arguably just three rooms of a tailor’s shop in Chicago in 1956. Aside from glimpses into an outside world beyond the shop’s front door and perhaps a room or two obliquely seen in the background, the film is grounded in a light filled reception area, a middle larger room, a smaller one behind, and each room darker than the one before. But where these simple facts should have added more claustrophobic doom to proceedings, they didn’t. Despite our capture within the same repeating walls of familiar rooms, the building menace and gratuitous violence (when it arrives) doesn’t particularly shock or jar and the revelation of the “rat” or the insider is obvious way before it’s eventual reveal.
Ostensibly it’s a film of a rube, a place man, a drop box and the cash shakedowns from local Mafia bosses but what I found most endearing was the performance of the film’s leading man, and his chameleon like qualities that blended perfectly into the madness unfolding around him.
“Leonard Burling” (Mark Rylance). Narrating throughout as he details the precise and exact manner of measurements for his art and craft, Leonard isn’t a tailor but rather a “cutter” and an English gentleman with an air of culture as well as a profuse use of courtesy to one and all. He may address the louts who regularly litter his shop to retrieve the parcels left in the drop box as “Master” or “Sir”, but he reserves the largest and warmest of human interactions and smiles for “Mable Shaun” (Zoey Deutch), his assistant in the bespoke tailoring shop as well as a wannabe gangsters moll for her boyfriend “Ritchie Boyle (Dylan O’Brien). Whereas Mable is positive, happy and somewhat of a dreamer, Leonard is pragmatic, stoic, quiet, meticulous and introspective, and their relationship remains somewhat ambiguous. Spoilers aside, his life and back story unpeels slowly and in perfect rhythm for which he is the film’s slow hearted beat. A war veteran lumbered with being the safe house for illegality he looks away from, Rylance’s portrayal leaks just enough of the duplicity you see in each of the three rooms in his shop with a telling exclamation to Mable:
“If we all had angels as customers, we’d have no customers at all”.
Simon Russell Beale shares a brilliant two man scene with Rylance partway through the drama as the ultimate Mafia Boss “Roy Boyle” and Johnny Flynn as “Francis” round off the main characters in Act 2 with spoiler redacted characters entering the fray in the film’s third Act in their pursuit of the film’s “MacGuffin”. For there is one, and the preserve of the character who was the film’s insider and string puller all along.
Or is it?
Rylance’s performance lifts a film let down by the stilted transitions between the rooms and the lack there of any tension or dread. The dissection too of who could be the ultimate insider also lets the film down as it’s played incredibly seriously and brilliantly shot, before becoming a string of tangled webs that never convince. Rylance also manages to infuse lots of little somethings as we go along that allow you to like his rather unlikeable character, but the film fails here too as he stands alone in this respect.
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Thanks for reading. I hope this message in a bottle in The Matrix finds you well, prospering, and the right way up in an upside down world.