‘The Outfit’ Review: Mark Rylance Makes Clothes for Killers in Smart but Subdued Mobster Drama
variety.comPeter Debruge Chief Film CriticIt’s hard to imagine anyone better suited to the lead role of Graham Moore’s “The Outfit” than Mark Rylance — the story of a Savile Row tailor (technically a “cutter,” but we’ll come back to that) who works more or less exclusively for an Irish mobster in 1956 Chicago.
Rylance’s character, Leonard Burling, knows the rules: You keep your head down and your mouth shut, and in return, you’re treated almost like family by the Boyle clan.
And if you don’t, well, we’ve all seen enough gangster pictures to know the consequences.Leonard hardly ever leaves his workshop, and neither do we, in “The Outfit,” a contained, almost play-like film noir the likes of which John Huston and Nicholas Ray were making in the early ’50s. (To reinforce that connection visually, production designer Gemma Jackson has dialed down the palette to mostly browns and grays, while DP Dick Pope employs a single strong ceiling light — shaped almost like an open casket — that leaves much of Leonard’s atelier in shadows.) Today, of course, this is yet another example of the COVID-era trend of drawing a handful of characters into a single location where some kind of crime takes place.
But Moore, who won an Oscar for his sensitive “The Imitation Game” script, is a much better writer than the hacks behind most of those pandemic quickies, assembling “The Outfit” as a strategic guessing game, à la “Deathtrap” or “Sleuth,” when Leonard’s workspace becomes a boiler room of sorts after a late-night shootout.
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