The Outfit

  Graham Moore gives this tight gangster film the feel of a stage play. Everything takes place in one space, the tailor’s shop. Characters enter and leave in a stagy manner. You’d think it was a filmed play but that’s not the point. The theatricality suggests an artificiality that coheres with the central theme: the thin veneer that civilization places over our innate and indomitable savagery. Fine clothes may make the man but the beast still lurks within. Within the individual and within the mean streets of the urban jungle. 

Within the nation too. As the graduate of Savile Row, master cutter Leonard seems a class, a world, apart  from the Chicago gunsels. Hence their sneering dismissal as “English,” as if he has no other identity than that arch of class. 

As he responds to the shifting incidents we’re impressed by Leonard’s mental agility and resourcefulness. Only towards the end, when he rolls up his sleeves, do we see that the classy cutter (“Not a tailor”) is cut from the same cloth as the Chicago killers. The arm tattoos reveal his natural fabric, the skin corrupted. 

Leonard ostensibly fled classy Britain to sell his classy suits in gangland Chicago. Boss Boyle was his first customer. As we learn, though, the London he fled was itself the thuggery and arson he finds in Chicago. 

As the senior Boyle observes, the difference between monkeys and men are tools. That’s evolution. Boyle has used guns to kill people — to “build” his rep, his gang, the neighbourhood. Leonard’s shears symbolize his traditional British craftsmanship (plus his lost wife’s devotion) but ultimately he turns their use to murder too. When he arrests his final thrust upon the fallen thug in midair Leonard saves those shears from an ultimate conversion to savagery. He keeps some control.  But they have killed a man as well as carving cloth.  

The opening narration proves a theatrical performance itself, one of the two recordings that will seal the poetic justice the cutter will deliver. Indeed his various ploys against the hoods are a dramatization of the many separate pieces the cutter must devise and wield to make the perfect “outfit.” Making a film is of course like that itself.    

Mabel proves another wolf in sheepskin, an apparent naif who plays her own games to con the cons, to escape the neighborhood that belatedly respects her thug father. Her scheme is an alternative craft to the tailor’s that she declines. 

The second fire is both a second end and a second new beginning for the cutter. Veneers and other fine suits are like that. They hide the embarrassing reality — but only for a while. Perfection is impossible because it can only be skin — or suit — deep.