The Outfit

This is a classic bit of crime cinema that hits all its marks and makes all the right moves. I enjoyed it, at least once the plot kicked in and the stakes kept getting ever higher.

Mark Rylance plays Leonard Burling, an English tailor who has set up shop in Chicago in the 1950s. Burling calls himself a cutter (he makes suits, he doesn’t just sew buttons) and never lets us forget that he was trained on the famous Savile Row.

His clients are gangsters who he seems happy enough to serve and he has an employee, young Mable Shaun (Zoey Deutch), who he watches with just a bit too much interest.

And then, bad things begin to happen and Leonard will spend a very long night navigating and negotiating with killers who, for their own reasons, need him alive. Well, they need him alive until they no longer need him.

I thought the first 20 minutes of this was a tough road, I knew it was setting itself up and getting all the pieces on the board for its eventual game but there was a decent moment there when I thought of turning it off.

I’m glad I didn’t because the rest of the movie is a thrilling crime chess match as Leonard attempts to get everything he wants out of a group of people who are either too stupid or too trusting to see what’s really going on.

There are about five solid twists in the game and enough is left to chance that when one character states that everything was part of the master plan I scoffed. Perhaps some of this went to plan but a lot of it seemed like a coat of many colors — pieces and plots come along and they get added to the plan but there was no way to predict each move on the way.

In other words, there may have been one or two twists too many, but each was good for a jolt and the action and the tension simmering.

Crime movies come in and out of fashion. This one reminded me of three other great films, A History of Violence, Eastern Promises, and Miller’s Crossing. Each one has characters playing their own game for their own reasons and each pays off spectacularly.

You can add this to the canon.

At one point a character in The Outfit considers the concept of perfection.

It’s at the finishings that you must come to terms with the idea that perfection is a necessary goal, precisely because it is unattainable. If you don’t aim for perfection, you cannot make anything great. And yet true perfection is impossible.

– The Outfit

Is writer/director Graham Moore talking about his own movie here?

It’s certainly not perfect. And again, some of the twists require characters to do just the right thing for the plan to fall into place and for the audience and the protagonist to walk out satisfied. Occasionally, you can feel the screenwriter’s thumb on the proceedings.

You can also get a sense of the budget as nearly every scene is in the tailor’s shop. My guess is they’ll be teaching this one in film schools as a lesson in how to make a stylish thriller with not that much money.

Regardless, when the final hand is played, and our tailor rolls up his sleeves to get to work, you’ll see that everything really does fit.