Graham Moore’s feature-length directorial debut, The Outfit, is a dapper, twist-filled crime story that relies more on dialogue than gunplay to move the action. Set in Chicago circa 1956, though bearing little relationship to the setting other than the proliferation of mobsters and a clattering of sawed-off Great Lakes accents, the film spends its entire running time in one neatly appointed men’s suit store on a long winter evening that keeps getting interrupted by men with guns and increasingly frayed tempers.
On the surface, the film’s story couldn’t be more different than that of Morten Tyldum’s The Imitation Game, for which Moore won an Oscar for his script, though both films share a love of nattily attired Englishmen puzzling out problems in life-or-death situations. The Englishman in this case is the suit store’s owner, Savile Row-trained tailor Leonard (Mark Rylance). He makes his living not just by crafting bespoke suits but looking the other way when members of the Boyle crime family show up to use the message drop box in the backroom. Leonard drinks his tea, cuts his cloth, and avoids thinking about the elephant in the room.
The precise and seemingly placid Leonard sustains this high-wire act primarily through the deference provided by his friendship with the patriarch of the Boyle family, Roy (Simon Russell Beale). But that chummy, civilized arrangement is shattered on the night that Francis (Johnny Flynn), Roy’s quite volatile right-hand gunsel, brings in the mob boss’s son, Richie (Dylan O’Brien), who’s been shot in the stomach by a rival clan of the Boyles.
The story that follows engineers a quasi-Hitchcockian scenario in which Leonard keeps multiple plates spinning to save his life and that of his secretary, Mable (Zoey Deutch). At gunpoint, Leonard puts his sewing skills to work patching up the bloody and screaming Richie. Adding to the mobsters’ tension is the discovery that there’s an informant and that the F.B.I. has bugged the store—disregarding the reality that in 1956 the F.B.I. was still pretending that organized crime didn’t exist. Also pushing events to a head is that a secret, cross-national organized crime ring known as the Outfit has left word that they’re considering the Boyles for membership and are planning to visit that night, amplifying the need to identify the rat.
Throughout, Moore and Johnathan McClain’s script drops tension-spiking elements around the shop, from the McGuffin of the F.B.I. audiotape (which the mobsters have gotten a copy of and are trying to find a machine to play it on so that they can identify the informant) to the dead body stored in a chest that’s slowly leaking blood onto the store’s spic-and-span floor. In multiple instances, the supposedly nebbishy Leonard finds himself squarely in the crosshairs of potential danger only to socially engineer his way out by playing one mobster off another.
The plot’s machinations become harder to believe as the night wears on and double-crosses multiply. However, The Outfit sells most of it due to its intelligent, non-hyperbolic writing and performances. Rylance’s blend of warmth, cunningly serene competence, and humility makes Leonard’s ability to navigate one threat after another more believable. His performance is matched by that of Beale, whose sharp take on the shrewd gangland warlord reads as nearly Shakespearean in its somehow not contradictory mixture of self-awareness and blind ego. And Deutch, in a nervy performance, turns Mable from a woman in distress to a keen-eyed operator with secrets of her own, who’s playing the same deadly game as the others.
Moore’s direction is confident and quick-paced, giving his actors room to maneuver without letting the narrative flag. But there are suggestions in The Outfit that he’s aware of and just fine with the limitations of the film’s story. “This isn’t art, this is a craft,” Leonard says early on about his tailoring. “We can talk about shocking originality later.” This reads like Moore writing to himself, and not necessarily in self-criticism. The Outfit isn’t especially original, but it’s well-crafted. Perhaps shocking originality can come with Moore’s next film.
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