The Oscar-winner gives a cool, calm centre to this tightly-buttoned drama about
Chicago gangsters rooting out a mole
The title has a double edge: it means a suit of clothes, and also the mob. US screenwriter and novelist Graham Moore won an Oscar for scripting The Imitation Game starring Benedict Cumberbatch as wartime codebreaker Alan Turing. Now he’s made his directing debut with his own co-written screenplay: an amusingly contrived single-location suspense thriller, full of twist and counter-twist, set in 1950s Chicago (the city of Moore’s birth). It sometimes feels like a more refined, more well-spoken and well-tailored version of Reservoir Dogs, with besuited gangsters turning guns on each other in an enclosed space and a shot tough guy seething in agony from his bullet wound. But it has a heavier tread than this: owing more, maybe, to Hitchcock’s Rope.
Mark Rylance provides a solid centre with a typically calm, coolly composed, quietly spoken performance, often giving us an opaque and unnerving twinkle of mischief. He plays Leonard, a
British tailor who left his homeland (for shadowy reasons) with nothing but his tailor’s scissors, and set up shop in Chicago. The reason he’s been able to make a success of things is that he is almost solely patronised by the local gangsters: the ageing capo is Roy Boyle (Simon Russell Beale), who runs this turf with his unreliable hothead son, Richie (Dylan O’Brien); Richie is snarlingly resentful that his old man now favours a smooth new lieutenant, Francis (Johnny Flynn).