The Outfit: A well-tailored but stagey mob drama

We have, over the past few months, seen more new releases comprising just one shot than films set in a single interior location. Graham Moore’s modest crime thriller demonstrates both the possibilities and limitations of such an approach. The Outfit, starring Mark Rylance as a mildly mobbed-up tailor, has the focused intensity of a theatre piece. It also occasionally leans towards declaratory language that sits uncomfortably in a cinematic setting. Train a gun on a fellow and he is likely to regale you with a three-minute monologue on motivations and morality. That’s what happens when you can’t cut to a hurtling car in a distant neighbourhood.

A correction. Leonard Burling would object to being called a “tailor”. He is, strictly speaking, a “cutter”, trained on Savile Row, of fine suits for well-off gentlemen. Fleeing a vaguely defined disaster – the details are later filled in among other shocking revelations – he has set up in an implausibly seedy area of Chicago during the mid-1950s. The local hoodlums use a container at the back of his shop as a sort of dead letterbox. His cheery secretary, Mable (Zoey Deutch), dreams of life elsewhere. An awkward equilibrium is maintained until the local crime boss’s son staggers in with a bleeding belly. Leonard can no longer keep the villains at arm’s length.

Rylance has, over recent films, risked indulging a stock character: the softly spoken innocent who evades eye contact as he tries to keep within himself. There is some of that here, but the actor also manages to hint at hidden menaces throughout. Though he is hunched over his work, he remains as watchful as a hungry cat that knows the supermarket delivery is on the way. He really comes into his own during a tense duologue – again, stubbornly theatrical – with Simon Russell Beale. Who would have imagined, when those two men were trading Shakespearean soliloquies on the London stage 30 years ago, that they would end up in an American mob drama?

The script is, if anything, a little too well-made. All the narrative lines come neatly together in a series of closing convulsions that take in one twist too many. Only someone who has never seen a film before (or, more useful still, a play) will overlook allusions to a Chekhovian weapon hanging over a Chekhovian fireplace.

It remains, nonetheless, a pleasure to see a good yarn played out in such professional fashion. Just try not to think of the awful pun in the title.

Opens on April 8th