The Sunday Times - UK (2022-04-10)

FILM

smug, it aspires to the clever

contrivance of Sleuth, or one

of David Mamet’s Cluedo-like

crime capers in which the

finger of suspicion points at

each character, in turn, and

is finally decided by our old

friend, the Law of the Least

Likely Suspect.

“I’m the rat,” Rylance says,

before breaking into a big

grin — he’s joking, of

course — because

Leonard is one of

those men who

listens without

talking, while the

gangsters yammer

on. “Why are you

telling me all this?” he asks.

Why indeed. If the purpose

was to demonstrate Rylance’s

Zen-like calm, mission

accomplished. With his

self-effacing manner and

blunt diction, Rylance excels

at playing so-called ordinary

men, who would normally

not be seen dead anywhere

near a movie camera, let

alone a red carpet, and yet

who want for nothing — giving

him a stillness that makes him

mesmerising on screen.

I wonder what would

happen if you put him in a

Harry Potter movie? Make the

whole thing go up in a puff of

You can wait for a great Mark
Rylance performance all year
long and then — like double-
decker buses — two come
along. First we had Rylance’s
sublime amateur golfer in The
Phantom of the Open, and now
in Graham Moore’s crime
thriller, he plays Leonard
Burling, a humble English
tailor working in a small shop
at the end of a quiet, snowy
street in Chicago in 1956.
From the first few frames of
the film — as we see Leonard
brew a pot of tea, oil his
shears and begin cutting
fabric — you can tell that
the role is tailor-made for
Rylance, from the fastidious
precision of his words and
deeds, right down to the silk
lining of his suits.
Using Leonard’s shop on
the south side of Chicago as a
kind of message station is the
Irish Mob, whose business he
turns a blind eye to. “If we
only allowed angels to be
customers,” he tells his
receptionist, Mable (Zoey
Deutch), “soon we’d have no
customers at all.” But one
night the boss’s son, Richie
Boyle (Dylan O’Brien), the
heir to this criminal
empire, shows up with
a bullet in his belly,
bleeding all over the
shop. “Sew him up,”
says his hard-knuckle
associate Francis
( Johnny Flynn), who also
dumps with Leonard a
suitcase containing
proof of an FBI snitch,
and news of a war
escalating between
the Boyles and
their rivals, the

La Fontaines. A busy night!

Soon Leonard’s small shop

becomes a pit stop for any

passing gangsters who feel

like dropping by, including

Mob boss Roy Boyle (Simon

Russell Beale), on the hunt for

one of his gang who is — wait

for it — dead and stashed in

one of Leonard’s cupboards.

Busier and busier!

The film fairly bristles

with plot twists, but they

all point smoothly in the

same direction: any plot

development that confines

the action back to Leonard’s

shop is loudly applauded,

but anything that threatens

to stray beyond its dingy

brown-and-grey confines

is cut off at the knees. I lost

count of the number

of times a character

is propelled out of

the door, for good

Cut from different cloth

Mark Rylance

mesmerises as a

quiet tailor plagued

by Irish mobsters

in 1950s Chicago

THE

CRITICS

HHHHH KO HHHH A-OK

HHH OK HH So-so H No-no

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16 10 April 2022