The Outfit (2022)

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It’s always boggled my mind how people can write tightly wound mysteries. Original stories like the ones Agatha Christie used to churn out, or more cinematically, Rian Johnson’s Knives Out or Ed Solomon’s No Sudden Move (directed by Steven Soderbergh), or even the Adam Sandler-led Murder Mystery written by James Vanderbilt. I’m not referring to stories that rely on a high underlying concept to drive them, but ones where the mystery is the concept.

Stories where every detail depends on every other detail, holding strands of plot together to the point where, if one were to not exist, the entire thing would crumble like a house of cards. Despite its flaws, Graham Moore’s The Outfit is one of these stories.

The opening lines of the film describe the deceiving intricacies of a two-piece suit. Leonard Burling (Mark Rylance), a cutter from England, explains to us how a two-piece suit is made up of 38 separate pieces, requiring no fewer than 228 steps to bring the finished product together. I should have seen where this story was going sooner, but I, like the oblivious characters in this movie, didn’t anticipate the tricks it was keeping up its proverbial sleeve and how the roller coaster of a narrative would weave together like the quartet of fabrics that make up one of Leonard’s outfits.

Perhaps that’s the result of a good writer – not one who can compose a perfect script, but one who can take a flawed one and imbue it with enough energy so those flaws don’t really matter.

Moore, who hasn’t seen one of his screenplays put on the big screen since 2014’s Alan Turing biopic The Imitation Game, partners with TV writer Johnathan McClain for this take on a gangster flick. They throw us some dialogue to let us know that this tale takes place during the small window between the release of 1955’s Rebel Without a Cause and James Dean’s death a few months later. Rylance claims to have moved to Chicago from England after the War due to the rising popularity of jeans, attributed to the popularity of the Rebel himself. Once in America, Leonard discovered that only mobsters could afford a good suit and, better yet, the only ones who still found it desirable to wear one.

A master of his craft, Leonard (and Rylance himself) has the type of face that instantly drums up tension just from the sheer fact that you don’t want anything bad to happen to this man. The soft piano score by Alexandre Desplat helps evoke a sort of terror enderlying the increasing levels of suspense. You see, the cutter’s shop doubles as a drop location for the Boyle family, and Leonard is eventually tasked with caring for the wounded Richie (Dylan O’Brien), the son of the head honcho.

Apparently, there’s a rat who’s been giving the FBI inside information on the Boyles, and a newfangled cassette tape contains information as to who that rat is. But in 1955 cassette players were hard to come by. Richie believes that his wild-card adoptive brother Francis (Johnny Flynn) is the culprit, meanwhile Francis thinks it’s Richie, or maybe Leonard.

Our director does this dance of who knows what and why, and sometimes that dance misses a step or two. Luckily, the occasional plot hole doesn’t halt this film’s energy whatsoever. Likewise, the dialogue by Moore and McClain is excellent, capturing the sense of that era and allowing the characters to be both human and pieces of a romanticized mythos at the same time. It helps to have actors who are on that same wavelength.

Rylance, like always, displays a warm presence, but here gives off an air of mystery as well, unpeeling crucial pieces of his character’s history right up to the very end, with a gleam in his eyes that remains unreadable, even to the audience.

O’Brien might just be the standout here, embodying the gangsters’ mentality as we’ve come to accept it throughout cinematic history, with hidden insecurities and chips on his shoulder, and an unflappable tenacity. O’Brien is another performer who fully understands the characters he portrays and is capable of translating that to a wholly believable performance, just as he does here, nailing the rhythm and inflections of a period-appropriate antihero, yet stays just outside of the realm of stereotype.

Lately, I’ve compared the actor to someone like Colin Farrell, an actor who came into the industry as a charismatic heartthrob but will leave it as a performer who’s always able to channel his own voice.

What makes The Outfit so commendable is how humble it seems to be. Much like the Coen brothers’ mob film Miller’s Crossing it’s striking how unstylized it seems compared to their other movies. When it comes to gangster flicks, it’s the story and the characters that matter – not how good they look. The Coens understood this with their understated 1990 classic, and so does Moore, focusing on the subjects at hand and the intricate story they occupy. The entire movie takes place within the walls of this suit shop. And yet, you almost forget that this is the case. Deceptive, indeed.