The Magic of Invisible Mending
A father and daughter at a tailoring workshop in Japan have mastered kaketsugi, the art of invisibly mending clothes — that is, repairing holes and tears in fabric so seamlessly and completely that they appear to never have been damaged in the first place. The before and after photos are incredible…you absolutely cannot tell where the repair was made, even under close inspection
Moore has said that the idea for “The Outfit” came from reading a report that the first taped evidence collected by the feds in a big organized crime case was taken from bugs planted in a Chicago tailor shop. This is not a re-creation of that episode, though the detail triggered Moore’s imagination — he co-wrote this script with Johnathan McClain — and sent the pair down a winding trail of manipulation and mind games. It also supplied them with the double-entendre of the film’s title: Here, a maker of outfits finds himself caught in the midst of a massive power struggle, as onetime Boyle allies begin to suspect one another and an off-screen gang war erupts, ordered by a shadowy underworld organization known as “the Outfit.”
Al Capone knew that clothes made the mobster. While head of the Chicago Outfit, he considered launching his own fashion line—the Al Capone Collection—but worried that hawking silks would hem in his fearsome reputation. At his 1931 trial for tax evasion, federal prosecutors tried to weaponize his dandyism, trotting out his personal tailor who testified, in a not-so-subtle dig, that Capone’s favorite colors were green and canary. Nevertheless, Capone’s tailored suits remain the mafia’s signature silhouette, and it’s under their sharp-shouldered shadow that Graham Moore sets his “The Outfit,” a tidy and self-congratulatory little thriller about a clothier who fights back against the mob.
Al Capone knew that clothes made the mobster
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.
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