“The Outfit” Is Made to Measure for Mark Rylance (2024)

A cold Chicago street, on a dark morning, in 1956. A storefront so discreet that it could be the entrance to a funeral parlor. Look closely, however, and you see the words stencilled on the window: “L. Burling. Bespoke.” And here comes Leonard Burling (Mark Rylance), making an early start. He is a tailor by trade, though he prefers to be called a cutter, and, as he brews a pot of tea, dons an apron, and oils his trusty shears, he talks us through the mysteries of his art, in a gentle voice-over. A suit, we are told, consists of thirty-eight separate pieces of material, and it should, in all respects, become its wearer. Leonard can size up a client at a glance. “Is this a man comfortable in his station?” he inquires.

Leonard is the hero of Graham Moore’s “The Outfit.” It is a film preoccupied with stations—with the question of how people slot into society and, every so often, feel a compulsion to change slots. Leonard has a young assistant named Mable (Zoey Deutch), for instance, who grew up down the block. “One way or another, I’m getting out of here,” she says, sounding as if she might burst into song. Leonard, on the other hand, was pleased to get into Chicago (which he pronounces “Tchickago”), having fled from London, where he learned his craft on Savile Row, for a fresh American life. The reason that he left his native land, he claims, is “bluejeans,” meaning that the demand for formal wear tailed off after the war. You don’t really bespeak a pair of jeans. You just put ’em on.

Chicago has furnished Leonard with a new breed of patron—folks like Roy Boyle (Simon Russell Beale), a Mob chieftain, and Roy’s son Richie (Dylan O’Brien), a poor reflection of his father’s solid self. Roy is fond of Richie, but he’d sooner rely on a henchman named Francis (Johnny Flynn). “Those customers are not gentlemen,” Leonard says to Mable, after Richie and Francis pay a visit. No, indeed. The wiseguys use Leonard’s store as a place where packages can be dropped off and collected, and you can see why. In their opinion, the tailor is barely a being: a background presence, who sees nothing and says even less.

We know better, though, because, having had the privilege of observing Rylance at work, onscreen or in the theatre, we realize that nothing is ever lost on him. The stealthy pace of “Wolf Hall,” on TV, was set by the sight of Rylance, as Thomas Cromwell, surveying great matters of state from his haven in the half shadows. “Why are you such a person?” the Duke of Norfolk asked Cromwell, adding, “It’s not as if you can afford to be,” and that note of condescension recurs in “The Outfit,” as one character after another misjudges the lowly Leonard. Hence the sharpest scene in the movie, amid reports of a snitch in the gang’s ranks. Without warning, Leonard makes his confession to Richie. “I’m the rat,” he says. Long pause. Then Richie laughs, and Leonard joins in. It was a joke, obviously—I mean, how could such a mouse of a man be a rat? Yet the thought continues to scurry in our heads.

This is Moore’s first feature as a director. He made his mark as a writer, and his screenplay for “The Imitation Game” (2014) won him an Academy Award. The plot of the new film, which he co-wrote with Johnathan McClain, is all curves and no straights; even those of us who go wild for twists may wonder, as the narrative enters yet another chicane, if we are getting too much of a good thing. To be kept guessing is not quite the same as being thrilled. The gravest problem for the movie, though, is not its convolutions but its pit stops—those awkward interludes when people halt in mid-activity, sometimes with weapons in their hands, to utter a notable speech. “Mr. Boyle, why are you telling me all this?” Leonard asks, after one such peroration, and he’s right to be bemused; such candor is scarcely in Boyle’s interest. Hoodlums, like monks, shut their traps.

Aside from the external shot of the storefront, “The Outfit” is confined entirely to Leonard’s establishment, and, as with “Sleuth” (1972), it’s hard to suppress the feeling that we could, and possibly should, be viewing these events onstage. (The fact that Leonard, Francis, and Boyle are all played by British actors is not the issue; in 2014, Brits filled the roles of Martin Luther King, Jr., LyndonB. Johnson, and George Wallace in “Selma,” and that lacked not a gram of authenticity.) What Moore’s film strives toward, and touches only erratically, is an emotional claustrophobia to match its physical squeeze. Consider the scene in which Francis, after harming Richie, exclaims, “Why’d you make me do that?” The allusion is clear and bold. Everyone familiar with Nicholas Ray’s masterpiece of 1951, “On Dangerous Ground,” remembers Robert Ryan, as a cop, advancing across a room toward a suspect and saying, “Why do you make me do it? You know you’re going to talk. I’m going to make you talk.” His voice, soft at first, becomes a rising snarl. “I always make you punks talk,” he says, then lifts his claws like a bear and starts to maul. It’s an authentically terrifying moment, the apotheosis of urban frustration and spleen. How can “The Outfit,” cunningly fashioned as it is, measure up to that?

It is twenty years since Adrian Lyne’s last movie, “Unfaithful,” which was all about a husband who was driven to distraction, and worse, by an adulterous wife. Now, in “Deep Water,” Lyne breaks new ground with the tale of a husband who is driven to distraction, and worse, by an adulterous wife, but who is able to sublimate his despair, to an extent, by raising snails. You see? A completely different story.

Vic Van Allen (Ben Affleck) is a wealthy sluggard, who has retired on the proceeds of the software that he designed for drone warfare. (Do I detect a super-subtle hint that his moral integrity may not be of the purest?) He also looks trashed; this may be Affleck’s least heroic performance, giving us an alpha male with tired eyes and the soul of a gamma-minus. Vic lives in New Orleans with his wife, Melinda (Ana de Armas), their young daughter, Trixie (Grace Jenkins), and his beloved gastropods, which he keeps in an adjoining shed. This being Lyne’s world, the heart of the house is the kitchen; think of Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger putting the contents of the fridge to creative use in “9 1/2 Weeks” (1986), or the rabbit soup bubbling merrily away on the stove in “Fatal Attraction” (1987). In one promising exchange, Melinda suggests cooking some of the snails with garlic and butter. Vic is not amused.

Unlike the careful heroine of “Unfaithful,” Melinda is far from secretive in her lusts. She makes out with young bucks of her choosing in public, at soirées, under the gaze not only of her husband but of their mutual friends. One such beau, Tony (Finn Wittrock), is invited round for dinner. “Tony was the first American I fucked,” she explains to Vic, in the airy way that one might say, “We met in eleventh grade.” (Where Melinda hails from is of no concern to the film.) And how does Vic react to this frankness? Is he as crestfallen as the cuckold played by WilliamH. Macy, in “Boogie Nights” (1997)? On the contrary. The more flagrantly Vic is cheated on, the more his crest begins to rise. He is angry and jealous, naturally, but there is no denying that the jealousy turns him on, to unnatural extremes. No Iago is required. He gives Melinda an oily massage after she has embarrassed him, in company, with a blond lunk, and she, in return, goes down on Vic, in the car, after watching him dance with another woman. How many Louisiana laws are being broken I hate to think.

You will be unsurprised to hear that this gumbo of perversity originates in a novel by Patricia Highsmith. You can also be sure, therefore, that the feelings being stirred around will boil into violence soon enough; wrath is not made to be contained. The screenplay is by Zach Helm and Sam Levinson, who do their best to leave the criminality in suspense. We see Vic apparently drowning one of the suitors in a pool, but are we watching a flashback, or is he dreaming, weakly, of the murder he might have wrought? Toward the end, “Deep Water” grows less ambiguous and more conventional, but the rest of it is actually well suited to Lyne’s fetishistic style, with its succulent closeups, and the bitter memory of Glenn Close’s character—depicted as a vengeful virago—in “Fatal Attraction” is somewhat eased by de Armas’s willful and cheerful Melinda. There is affection, as well as derision, in the mirth with which she greets her husband: “Hello, Mr. Boring!”

This movie struck me as a compelling argument against early retirement. The Van Allens and their pals seem to have nothing else in mind, or in the diary, but makin’ whoopee—swimming parties, dancing parties, and lawn parties, with guests crawling along on all fours. (Erotomania and homicide, true to Highsmith, may simply be the next step in fending off ennui.) In a weird inversion, the grownups behave like children, while the real child, Trixie, has the unnerving precocity of an adult. At bath time, she chats to Vic about the rumors. “I still think you drowned him, you’re just telling me you didn’t,” she says, with a smile, as if proud of her clever scheming daddy. That kid will go far.♦

“The Outfit” Is Made to Measure for Mark Rylance (2024)
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