The Outfit movie review: Mark Rylance gets stitched up in an ill-fitting chamber drama

Though The Outfit is cut from the same cloth as Reservoir Dogs, Graham Moore isn’t as skilled as Quentin Tarantino at generating controlled chaos.

• cast

  Mark Rylance, Dylan O'brien, Johnny Flynn, Zoey Deutch

• director

  Graham Moore

• language

  English
  
  The Outfit, a sew-sew single-location drama from first-time director Graham Moore, is a title with two meanings: the bespoke suits fashioned by its lead Leonard Burling, a soft-spoken English cutter (not “tailor”, he insists) played by Mark Rylance, and the organised crime syndicate who use his shop as a dead drop in 1950s Chicago. When roped into a turf war, Leonard must outwit trigger-happy mobsters antsy over the possibility of a rat in their ranks over a fateful night of subterfuge, stitch-ups and shoot-outs.

  An unassuming and often underestimated man like Leonard is a role tailor-made for Rylance, whose work of restrained intelligence here is like a dagger wrapped up in silk. That people underestimate Leonard plays to his advantage, as he weaponizes their presumptions against themselves. At one point, in the middle of a leisurely chat, he reveals to the mob boss’s son Ritchie Boyle (Dylan O’Brien) that he is the rat they are looking for. But Ritchie laughs it off, and Leonard too admits he was only joking. But you have the nagging feeling Leonard knows more than he lets on, that if he isn’t letting the mask slip, it is to stay a step ahead of the mob. As not only his life but that of his assistant Mable (Zoey Deutch) too hangs by a thread, he can’t sit on pins and needles, waiting for someone else to do the rescuing. He must do it himself, even if it means ripping what he sewed. These sewing idioms and puns practically write themselves — at least till the material runs out. (See what we mean?)

  

  Mark Rylance as Leonard Burling in The Outfit

  But this is dead serious stuff. Before he moved to Chicago and opened a shop (not called “Seams Legit”), Leonard was a cutter who had trained and owned a shop at London’s Savile Row, the nexus of Britain’s bespoke suit-making. Then, the WWII happened and he had to leave it all behind. What all he left behind will be the movie’s final rug-pull, a particularly ludicrous one.

  As the mob happen to be his most loyal clientele, Leonard keeps his lips buttoned as snazzily-dressed wiseguys come in and out of the shop to drop envelopes of protection money into a mailbox in the backroom. When the mob enforcer Francis (Johnny Flynn) walks in one night with Ritchie shot in the stomach, Leonard is dragged into the maelstrom of mob hysteria. Given earlier that morning, a tape recording left in the mailbox suggested there is an FBI informant in their organisation, trust already hangs by a slender thread. As the night stretches out, the volatility escalates.

  

  Zoey Deutch as Mable

  Confining the drama to a single location gives directors a chance to get creative, like a back-to-basics exercise in filmmaking. But Moore, who wrote the Oscar-winning screenplay of The Imitation Game, gives us a threadbare patchwork quilt of a chamber mystery with all its theatrical seams showing.

  It is written, staged and performed like a filmed play. Though The Outfit is cut from the same cloth as Reservoir Dogs, Moore isn’t as skilled as Tarantino at generating controlled chaos. The movie even has a thread about a body hidden in a trunk that recalls Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, but it can’t generate the same level of suspense or surprise from it. It’s got all the double-crossing and misdirection one expects from a stagey mystery. Only, it doesn’t confound our expectations. No Savile Row-trained cutter can patch over its many pratfalls.

  

  Dylan O'Brien as Richie and Johnny Flynn as Francis

  If the movie doesn’t fully come apart at the seams, it’s because Rylance is holding it all together. The other actors have been stitched up with loose-fitting roles. Mable, who looks up to Leonard as a father figure, dreams of travelling around the world. That is about the extent of character detail and motivations Deutch has to work with to turn her into a living, breathing person. O’Brien does not make for a convincing wise guy prone to outbursts. He is no Joe Pesci. Flynn too lacks the menacing presence to sell us a mob enforcer. Unlike Rylance, the equally seasoned Simon Russell Beale, who plays the mob boss Roy Boyle, gets too little screentime to make a solid impression.

  Within the single-location limitations, eminent cinematographer Dick Pope attempts to create a concentrated atmosphere of slow-burn tension. As the action is set in the night and in the 50s, lamps do most of the lighting. Colours and textures are flattened with a digital sheen. Light to darker shades of browns mirror the costume design. Alexandre Desplat’s jazz orchestrations tend to overreach here, interfering with the actual drama. The stagey quality extends to the aesthetic too, which is less denotative, more decorative. Leonard, whose voice-over clues us in on Bespoke Tailoring 101, explains, “You cannot make something good until you understand who you’re making it for.” If Moore had heeded his own character's words, he would not have tailored a play for the screen to an audience expecting a movie.

  The Outfit is available for rent on Amazon Prime Video.