The show must go on, as the venerable saying goes, and two years’ worth of Covid restrictions and limitations forced filmmakers to think way outside the box.
Sometimes — as in this case — with remarkably clever results.
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| Leonard (Mark Rylance) and his assistant, Mable (Zoey Deutch), are about to endure an unusual — and increasingly dangerous — night. |
(Moore shared an Academy Award for co-scripting 2014’s equally engaging The Imitation Game. He definitely has a way with plot and well-sculpted characters.)
The setting is early 1950s Chicago. Leonard Burling (Mark Rylance), a soft-spoken ex-pat Brit, has established a successful corner-shop career as a talented maker of fine suits. (“I’m a cutter,” he patiently insists, more than once, “not a tailor.”)
Moore opens the film with a lengthy sequence as Leonard explains his craft — in voiceover — while we watch how a suit emerges from paper patterns and four different kinds of fabric. Because of the quietly reverential quality of Rylance’s narration, and the fascinating process itself — so esoteric, and highlighted by an old-world attention to precision — this prologue is totally captivating.
(If you assume this introduction is insignificant, think again; Leonard’s calmly measured recitation has an ingenious third-act payoff.)
Leonard’s customers are greeted by Mable (Zoey Deutch), his receptionist/assistant. Their relationship is friendly and cordial; the affection and mutual respect are obvious … although Leonard, wholly at peace with his place in the world, is amused by Mable’s restlessness.
But not everybody coming through the front door is a customer. Numerous daily visitors bypass Mable — she never looks up — and head straight to Leonard’s rear cutting room, where they place sealed packets into a lockbox. The shop is a drop-off point for protection money payments, and the neighborhood is under the thumb of organized crime.
As it happens, Leonard’s best customer, Roy Boyle (Simon Russell Beale), is the local boss.
