The Outfit

This year’s Glasgow Film Festival launches with the UK premiere of Graham Moore’s fun crime caper about a tailor in 1950s Chicago who becomes embroiled in a mob conspiracy.

Leonard Burling is a suit maker from London who left Savile Row to open his own tailoring business in Chicago. The year is 1956; prohibition is long gone, the USA’s economy has bounced back in style following the Great Depression, and normal Americans are experiencing a level of prosperity that they’d never known before. Although Al Capone has been dead for almost a decade, Chicago’s underworld continues to thrive; business, as they say, is booming.

Burling (Mark Rylance) is obsessed with his craft. He describes the art of suit making while we watch him work, savouring every cut of fabric, practically caressing his creation before hanging the unfinished garment on a railing when the working day is over. His workshop is a sacred place, but we quickly learn that Burling partakes in a little underworld activity of his own; he has a deposit box in the back room of his shop that he allows members of the Boyle crime family – Chicago’s most prominent Irish gangsters – to use for underhand transactions. It’s barely an inconvenience to him, so what’s the harm? A few brown envelopes ain’t gonna hurt nobaaady, right?

Wrong. One night after closing, Burling answers the door to find Richie Boyle (Dylan O’Brien) and his right-hand man, Francis (Johnny Flynn). Richie – who is the son of the head of the Boyle crime family – has been shot by a rival gang and the pair need Burling – or ‘English’, as they call him – to help treat Richie’s wounds and give them a place to hide. After unconventionally patching up Richie’s bullet wound, Francis tells ‘English’ that they have a tape that contains audio of a bugged conversation that will allow them to identify a rat within the Boyle ranks; the only problem is that this is 1956 and access to cassette players or hi-fi systems is hard to come by, so the rat remains unidentified until they have means to play the tape.

The film unravels over the course of one night in the tailoring workshop, twisting in one direction then the other as Burling finds himself at the centre of the search for the real identity of the Boyle family snitch. Crime family boss Roy Boyle (Simon Russell Beale) shows up with henchman Monk (Alan Mehdizadeh) to investigate for himself; even Burling’s receptionist, Mable (the impressive Zoey Deutch) becomes embroiled in the finger pointing. As the conspiracy begins to pull apart at the seams, everyone in Burling’s workshop is under suspicion in what turns out to be a long and bloody night.

The excellent Johnny Flynn with Mark Rylance

Graham Moore makes his directorial debut with The Outfit, having previously won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2015 for his script for The Imitation Game, the story of Alan Turing’s work during World War II to decode the Nazi enigma machine, starring Benedict Cumberbatch. Moore’s first directorial effort is a fun crime caper that works on several levels; an engaging gangster neo-noir throwback with enough snappy dialogue and back-and-forth taunting to edge The Outfit into comedy territory. It may have been fuelled by the complimentary cava on arrival at the Glasgow Film Theatre, but many of Rylance and co.’s lines received roaring laughter from the film festival audience.

Although Rylance’s masterful portrayal of Burling shares some traits with Daniel Day-Lewis’ soft-spoken, equally obsessed fellow tailor Reynolds Woodcock, Phantom Thread this is not. The Outfit takes itself far less seriously than Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2017 film, an obvious comparison given the shared sartorial subject matter. While the fictional tailor’s share the trait of hiding things in the lining of the garments they make, Burling does this to outsmart dangerous gangsters, whereas Day-Lewis is more interested in the complex psychological warfare waged towards his assistant-stroke-muse-stroke-lover. The Outfit takes its cues from more conventional places, like the mischievous capering of George Roy Hill’sThe Sting or the claustrophobia and Mexican stand-offs of Reservoir Dogs. The all-in-one-place setting (an approach favoured on films made during the heavily restricted COVID era) works, with the material having enough weight for the actors to hold their own with Rylance; Johnny Flynn, as Francis, was a particular standout – he appeared to be plucked straight from a Chicago speakeasy in 1956. The story could be convincingly adapted for the stage; maybe theatre legend Rylance could even reprise his role? 

As we were welcomed to the opening of the 2022 edition of Glasgow Film Festival, Allison Gardner – CEO of Glasgow Film and the festival’s co-director – said how happy she was to welcome audiences back to the GFT for in-person screenings. A real luxury, a throwback to a simpler time. Having The Outfit as the opening film resonated in the same way. A throwback to the kind of films that seem to be in short supply at the moment, sitting on the side-lines while blockbuster franchises take up the vast majority of cinema space. Whilst nothing ground-breaking, The Outfit mixes laughs with thrills; a serious plot that doesn’t take itself too seriously in what feels like a throwback to a bygone era.

A great way to start the film festival. Here’s to the next 11 days.