Aurora Film Society Presents: The Outfit

General Admission tickets: $10.00

06:30pm Doors

07:00pm Show Time!

All tickets sales are considered a donation to The Aurora Film society and The Fox Valley Music foundation.

About the Film:

The Outfit [2022 / Graham Moore / 106 minutes]

A throwback to an older style of movie thrillers in which the majority of the menace is implied instead of shown, "The Outfit" takes place mostly over one night in a Chicago tailor's shop during Christmastime, 1956. Sir Mark Rylance plays Leonard the tailor, or rather the cutter; he was trained by the leading lights of Savile Row, and he takes umbrage with being called a mere "tailor". Leonard is a quiet, reserved, middle-aged Englishman who plies his trade smack in the middle of a neighborhood controlled by the Irish mob. Boss Roy Boyle (Sir Simon Russell Beale) uses Leonard's shop as a dead drop for the weekly protection money his hoods squeeze from the local businesses, but Boyle is also one of Leonard's best customers, so he looks the other way. Boyle's son, Richie, and Boyle's loyal lieutenant, Francis, drop and pick up cash at the shop several times a week. Richie is also dating the shop's receptionist, Mable (Zoey Deutch), who is the only person on earth Leonard actually cares about, another reason why he doesn't make waves with the Boyle Mob.

After a surprise gunfight with the LaFontaines, an upstart Caribbean gang trying to muscle into Boyle's territory, Francis drags a badly-wounded Richie to the shop in the middle of the night and forces Leonard to "stitch him up" and hide a mysterious briefcase snatched from the scene. Boss Boyle himself arrives at the shop and quickly deduces that there's an informer in their ranks when he discovers the briefcase contains a plethora of FBI wiretaps and extremely incriminating evidence that could bring down not just Boyle's gang but the whole of Al Capone's national syndicate "The Outfit".

When questioned about all this, Leonard assumes the phrase "The Outfit" is simply referring to fashionable garments, but it's clear to us in the audience that Leonard is quite a bit more clever and knowledgeable on these matters than he lets on. One of the great pleasures of this film is watching how Leonard over the course of the night slowly reveals his own layers of cunning, something he'll need every bit of in order to survive this ordeal and keep Mable out of harm's way. "The Outfit" depicts a fascinating game of twists and reversals, but it's Rylance's brilliant slow-burn characterization of Leonard that imbues the film with its true heart.

The Aurora Film Society

Since 2018, the Aurora Film Society (AFS) has been broadening our community’s collective horizons by screening great movies together. For $60 a year, our subscribers are shown 12 carefully selected & curated movies, works that are historically important & groundbreaking, works that provide a window into far-flung cultures, works that are sometimes overlooked or unavailable to most audiences. The AFS puts a special emphasis on showing the sorts of luminous & idiosyncratic stories from beyond the mainstream that people of the Fox Valley area would normally not have a chance to see in a theatrical setting. We screen every third Wednesday of the month at The Venue.
For questions and/or to subscribe, please email [email protected]
To see our current schedule & past movies, visit aurorafilmsociety.org

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