Zoey Deutch as Mable is devoted to Mark Rylance as “English” in The Outfit
The Outfit (2022)
Leonard Burling (Mark Rylance) is a cutter – he profoundly disdains the word “tailor” – trained in his craft on London’s Savile Row. He’s called “English” by those denizens of Chicago’s criminal underworld he has to deal with. It’s a trivializing putdown of a man whose polished speech and meticulously polite behavior puzzles and amuses them. It’s their way of sneering at him and intimidating him, but they’re also quietly amazed at his poise, good manners and grace under pressure. He turns out bespoke suits with an elegance that doesn’t call for boasting. For this seasoned craftsman, taking credit feels out of place, simply not done.
But pressure indeed mounts for poor, besieged English not long after the movie’s opening, and doesn’t let up until the shocking conclusion. This movie is set in a single location, a tailoring shop in 1956 Chicago. But by the end the whole world has been summoned to help unravel a single night’s goings on. The set-up is tight, but the writing, acting and directing are disarmingly fluid. It feels as if any of these people could do almost anything at any moment.
The writer-director Graham Moore (who co-wrote the script with Jonathan McClain) begins in a crisp, near-documentary style. In a fascinating voiceover, English explains the painstaking work required to construct a truly “fit” suit, which depends not just on skill but on knowing the man who will wear it. He makes suits for criminals and ordinary folks, without discrimination. When his loyal shop assistant Mable (Zoey Deutch) arrives, there’s hardly a word exchanged between them, and she settles into her daily routine greeting customers at the front desk. But Mable has lived in the neighborhood all her life and is yearning to get out of Chicago and see the world.
Night falls. In staggers Richie Boyle (Dylan O’Brien), son of local crime boss Roy Boyle and heir apparent to Roy’s underworld enterprises, bleeding from a bullet wound. Helping the gasping Richie is one of Roy’s favored enforcers, the flippant, merrily sadistic Francis (Johnny Flynn). Francis at an early age came under Roy’s wing, and over the years he’s taken six bullets (the mobsters call them “marbles”) in service to the boss. He’s no respecter of Richie, who has a way of being absent or going slack when bullets start to fly. His loss of nerve on this night has gotten him shot, and Francis only reluctantly helps English to stanch Richie’s bleeding.
The two young men exchange taunts in a manner that seems familiar to both yet is edging closer to violence. Earlier we’ve seen how both men regularly go into the back room where English scrupulously plies his trade. They check on the contents of a locked letterbox on the wall. During the day mysterious men enter the shop, stalk silently to the back room and drop envelopes into the box, each containing a contribution to the Boyle gang or a crucial piece of information it needs.
Dylan O’Brien as Richie faces off with Johnny Flynn as Francis in The Outfit
One envelope is marked with an oval emblem and a line drawn through it – logo of “The Outfit”, a criminal network formed after Al Capone’s death. It’s a nationwide gang confederation created to ensure protection and to tip off members when law enforcement is closing in.
Roy’s gang has been promised membership in The Outfit if they continue to perform assigned tasks. It’s now looking as though only one final task needs doing, namely, the elimination of “The La Fontaines”, a thriving numbers racket on the city’s South Side. If Roy can help wipe them out, he and his gang will be taken under the umbrella of The Outfit and enjoy shielding from police and the FBI.
There’s just one problem. Francis suspects that there’s a rat in the Boyle gang. Richie and Francis, after a shootout with The La Fontaines where Richie took that bullet, have arrived at English’s shop with proof of the betrayal: a tape cassette which, when listened to, will reveal the snitch. A machine needs to be found post haste to listen to that tape. Someone within the Boyle organization has been tipping off The La Fontaines that the Southside outfit is targeted for elimination. The tape comes from a bug planted by the Feds. But where was it planted? The Boyle gang has to play the tape, figure out where it was recorded, and bingo: they’ll learn who’s the rat.
How has the mild-mannered English seen his business turned into a nest of vipers? We later learn that Roy Boyle was English’s first customer when he set up shop in Chicago.
After an altercation between Richie and the ambitious Francis turns bloody, and Richie doesn’t show up to meet his father, Roy comes looking for his son.
The night’s threats, gunplay and hairsbreadth deceptions have only begun. Could English be the rat? Mable? Or the ruthless Francis, itching to control a gang of his own? Confining the action to a single location might seem limiting, but it actually has the opposite effect. With nowhere to go, and with a gun at your head, you keep still, and do as you’re told, if you want to stay alive. Also, make no mistake: you fabricate lies at your own risk. And the tension on screen has nowhere to go but up.
The deadly seriousness rings through all of the excellent performances. The standout is Rylance, as a bespectacled master of his craft who’s also a keen observer and an ardent listener. Rylance keeps English’s hushed subservience to a band of thugs so contained and strategic that we sense he must have something up his sleeve to keep himself safe. But repeatedly when his life is threatened, he looks genuinely scared, completely unsure whether his desperately mumbled deflections will be believed.
Similarly, we wonder if Mable knows more about these criminal visitors to the shop than she’s letting on. She’s sleeping with the handsome Richie but insists that in pillow talk he’s divulged nothing to her about his father’s deeds or his enemies.
Simon Russell Beale as Roy Boyle confronts Mark Rylance as Leonard in The Outfit
When Roy himself arrives looking for Richie, events, already blood-stained, turn even more grim. As Roy, Simon Russell Beale gives a performance that matches Rylance’s clockwork timing and vocal proficiency. Like Rylance, Beale is a quintessentially English actor, steeped in Shakespeare and the classics.
But here, unlike Rylance, he has to pull off a 1956 Chicago crime-boss accent and manner, and he does so with terrifying accuracy. Flynn, too, is British, and as Francis he snarls in convincing Chicago tough-guy cadences. I was born in Chicago and raised in one of its suburbs, and the entire cast gets Chicago speech wonderfully right. Even the pauses fall where they should. But that’s owing, too, to the chilling, cleverly plotted script, its dialogue rife with skullduggery. (Moore, born and raised in Chicago, also wrote the 2014 Oscar-winning adapted screenplay for The Imitation Game.)
Shot and cut with cool precision, its jolts tactically arrayed to keep a viewer off balance, The Outfit isn’t the least bit profound. It’s a contrivance, sinister yet cheeky. At the same time, it isn’t remotely casual in its impeccable workmanship. Watching it, you take pleasure from its shifting, menacingly scaled and lit compositions. The cinematographer is Dick Pope; the editor is William Goldenberg; and the richly veneered 1950s production design is by Gemma Jackson. Sophie O’Neill and Zac Posen did the telling, tastefully understated costumes.
The movie’s twists kept me riveted right up to the end. And Rylance’s final reckoning with himself, which is what the story has been leading to all along, is both startling and almost comically apt. The story’s mystery centers on its most inscrutable character after all.