A decent fit

When we first saw the preview for The Outfit, one thing stuck out to me: Mark Rylance. That was the driving impetus for me to see the film, as he's been brilliant in everything else that I've seen him in. He made the pedestrian Bridge of Spies worth watching. He was compelling in Dunkirk. He did an excellent Bill Kunstler in The Trial of the Chicago 7. I'll watch pretty much anything with him in it. Otherwise, the preview looked a lot like a typical gangster film. And, 'lo and behold, it was a pretty typical gangster film, but Rylance was still brilliant.

It's difficult to sell gangster stories to me these days because I've seen enough of them to no longer be particularly interested. We had a discussion on ThereWillBe.Games a while back about a game based on the FX show, Sons of Anarchy. A few people mentioned that they had known people who were less interested in playing what was a very interesting engine building game because of having to assume the role of the rather ruthless gang members from the show. They also mentioned that the game, which had gone out of print with the FX license having expired, had been reimplemented as a 1920s gangster game called (sigh) Wise Guys. I pointed out that, not only were those "wise guys" every bit as ruthless as their modern drug-dealing counterparts, but that the topic of gangsters from a bygone era was played out to the point of parody. I still feel that way about most creative outlets that try to delve back into that topic. We've been there, to the point that Martin Scorsese spent an ungodly three-and-a-half hours trying to take a new angle on that tired genre with The Irishman. (Newsflash: He didn't succeed.) So, I was setting myself up to be disappointed with the story as a whole, but felt like Rylance would still make it entertaining. I was right on both counts.

Rylance plays Leonard Burling, an English tailor (or, as he insists, a cutter) running a shop in a rough Chicago neighborhood where the only people that can earn him a living are the gangsters that run said neighborhood. His receptionist, Mabel (Zoey Deutch) regularly talks about "getting outta this town", but is eventually revealed to be involved with the local gang, as the girlfriend of the son of the local leader. When the dropbox that the gang has installed in the back of Burling's shop begins receiving packages from "The Outfit" of Capone fame, the comfortable relationships that all of them enjoy begin to go awry. That's a semi-interesting premise, since it involves a set of people that are directly, but still only indirectly involved with the local mob's business. How they choose to live their lives around it or at the periphery of it generates enough humor for the audience to be entertaining. Rylance, as the focal point of the film, is also the fulcrum of most of that humor. But the rest of the cast is pretty rote, from Mabel to tough guy Francis (Johnny Flynn) to local boss, Roy Boyle (Simon Russell Beale.) There's some good tension in some of the scenes and a bit of mystery as to how they're going to work their way out of the dilemmas that they stumble into, but the plot is fairly predictable from beginning to end and the film ends up working as solely a vehicle for Rylance's brilliance.

There's nothing wrong with that, of course. At this point, I'd gladly watch a one-man show with Rylance, almost regardless of topic and this film actually doesn't stray too far from that. It's set very much in theater fashion, as we never go farther from the shop than the sidewalk outside and the vast majority of the action takes place in Leonard's fitting room and workshop. But you could tell that Leonard was more than just a simple cutter (or, really, a cutter of a different type) and you could predict Mabel's role in the story almost from the moment she opened her mouth about wanting to be anywhere but her home neighborhood. It was all pretty obvious. That doesn't mean that it wasn't entertaining, but it was largely because of who and what Rylance is, and not because the story was particularly compelling. In fact, most of the characters other than Leonard were fairly cut-and-paste, despite a solid performance from Flynn. So, I can't say that it was either brilliant or compelling... except for Rylance, who is the sole reason that I'd recommend it. If you're not a fan, become one. If you're just a fan of gangster films, see this one for the lead actor and if you enjoy the rest of it because you're a fan of the genre, so much the better. But don't kid yourself. The reason you're sitting there is to watch a modern artist at work and it has nothing to do with his shears or the guns around him.