Mark Rylance in ‘The Outfit’: Film Review | Berlin 2022

Broadway may be back and London’s West End up and running again, but those viewers still wary of returning to the theater could make do with The Outfit. It may have been originally written for the screen by its director Graham Moore (who won an Oscar for writing The Imitation Game) and co-screenwriter Johnathan McClain (also an executive producer here). But with its single-locale setting, casting of British stage superstars Mark Rylance and Simon Russell Beale, and talky, voiceover-laden mousetrap of a script, this handsome but itsy-bitsy production could only be more theatrical if it was shown with an intermission and served pre-booked gin and tonics at the bar. It’s not even slightly surprising to learn that its scenes were shot in sequential order.

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Back in the day, calling a film “theatrical” was critic code meaning something old-fashioned, lacking in cinematic pizzazz or just boring; in the current climate, it’s almost a compliment. In this case, it means that aside from the fact that this is literally like a theater production in nearly every way except there’s no proscenium arch, The Outfit is also a refreshingly grown-up, original work, as pleasingly assembled as a good crossword puzzle. Or, if you prefer to riff on the garment-making angle central to its story, the film is flatteringly and economically cut from fine cloth, cleverly constructed, and only a little marred by flaws in the finishing. But as its protagonist, Leonard Burling (Rylance), notes toward the end, perfection is always something you’re striving for yet can never achieve.

Shot on a sound stage in London, the film boasts a set that has been designed and dressed (under the supervision of Gemma Jackson) to represent a gentleman’s outfitters in Chicago in the mid-1950s. It’s a box-car-long workspace that belongs to Cockney-accented Burling, a master “cutter,” as in cutter of patterns and cloth, a skill he learned through years of training on London’s storied Saville Row. (He insists that folks know that cutter is a more prestigious job than tailor, which just means someone who sews on buttons and the like.)

Having emigrated to America after WWII — maybe because, as he tells it, blue jeans were putting him out of business back home, or maybe because he needed a fresh start after some mysterious trauma — methodical, meticulous Burling has built a business in the windy city catering to the only clientele that can afford bespoke suits as fine as the ones he makes: gangsters.

Some of his most frequent customers are members of the Boyle crime family, headed by steely-gazed Roy Boyle (Beale), with his show-off son and heir apparent Richie (Dylan O’Brien) and their ambitious lieutenant Francis (Johnny Flynn, also known for Martin McDonagh’s recent stage play Hangmen, as well as films Beast, Emma and Stardust).

Ever watchful but poker-faced Burling affects not notice much that the Boyles are using a dropbox in his fitting room to pass messages and small parcels back and forth between themselves. But as the plot picks up pace it becomes clear that they know trouble is brewing between them and their rivals, the La Fontaine Gang of number runners based in an adjacent territory. A turf war could be messy given the Boyles are hoping to be brought in under the nationwide crime organization known as “the outfit,” a legacy of the Al Capone years.

But there’s a snag. The word on the street has it that the FBI has been using this new-fangled technology that’s capable of recording conversations via “bugs” on something called a “cassette tape” (when we finally get to see it, it’s a wonderfully period-accurate prop that looks like something made from Bakelite, teak and honest man’s sweat). Another problem fraying the bolt: There’s a rat in their midst, passing tapes of their conversations to their enemies. Francis is determined to find out who’s the rodent among them, although viewers will be quick to wonder if he’s just trying to throw off anyone suspecting it’s actually him.

It would be a shame to spoil how Burling gets tangled up in all this, so suffice it to say that it all comes unraveled (okay, I’ll stop with the sewing puns now) at his shop over the course of 48 hours or so, with drama that includes impromptu surgery on a gunshot wound, bodies hidden in trunks and giveaway clues sitting in plain sight. The wild card in the bunch is Burling’s receptionist Mable (Zoey Deutch, nailing the Chicago accent), a local girl who can’t wait to get out of town and go somewhere exciting like Paris. Leonard looks on her like a daughter, hopeful that she might take up his offer to train as his apprentice one day — as long as they both get out of this alive.

True to the palette of the period as filtered through Burling’s memories of Saville Row elegance, everything looks creamy as a cup of cocoa thanks to all the shades of leather and heathery tweed lying about the place. Ace cinematographer Dick Pope (Mr. Turner, The Illusionist) lights it like a spooky Mayfair nightclub with pools of warm glow amid the cluttered dark. And of course, given it’s a film about a cutter, the costumes by Sophie O’Neil and noted designer Zac Posen are perfectly on point, each suit a character study in line, draping and lapel width. Mable’s off-duty oversized gingham jacket in cream and burgundy — gathered just so at the back with perfect princess seams, and featuring a fascinating asymmetrical arrangement of front closures — says everything you need to know about her ahead-of-the-curve sense of style. Or is it a sign that she’s just a few buttons short of the full placket? Alexandre Desplat’s discreetly slinky score is the plumed hat that makes the outfit in terms of technical credits.

Aptly, since the plot is all about who knows what and who is lying, the performances across the board are exemplary studies in screen-acting subtlety, which is perhaps where it makes most sense that this is a film instead of a play. Rylance, Flynn and Beale are especially gifted at raising an eyebrow just a millimeter high enough to suggest a fib is in progress or adding a microsecond of hesitancy here or there to enhance the effect. Actors know that anyone can play a character who is lying badly. It’s a whole other level of skill to play one who lies well, and tells the audience that without entirely giving it away.

There’s so much craft here on every level, from the performances to the choice of snowglobes seen on a shelf, that I feel churlish pointing out there are few not-inconsiderable clunkers. Maybe it’s meant to back up the plausibility of how Francis is said to have taken six bullets to save Roy’s life years before, but the menfolk in this film seem to recover from bullet wounds with astonishing, deeply unrealistic speed.

Also — and this may be one for the fashion historians to rule on — I don’t think Burling’s claim that blue jeans practically put him out of business when people in the U.K. started wearing those instead of bespoke clothing is even remotely something a garment maker would claim at this point in time. He might blame the rise of ready-to-wear in general, or the economic hardships of post-war Britain. But hardly anyone wore jeans there until the 1960s at least. Heck, outside of bikers, agricultural workers, some hip teens and people visiting dude ranches on holiday, hardly anyone in the States wore jeans in the mid-50s. But maybe that misstatement from Burling is itself made to be a clue?