TO BE OR NOT TO BESPOKE

Opening this weekend:

The Outfit--This gangster thriller takes place almost entirely inside a small, classy shop in '50s-era Chicago run by an English tailor or, as he prefers, a "cutter." The Savile Row veteran makes elegant suits, largely for Chicago gangsters. He also has allowed a slotted box to be installed in his back room, from which the mobsters pick up messages. Some of the envelopes are marked with a symbol indicating that they are from "The Outfit," which causes the recipients to look at each other significantly and hurry off to who knows what intrigues.

The Cutter, whose name is listed in the credits as Leonard but to whom the gangsters affectionately refer only as "English," is played by Mark Rylance, close to the flawlessly made vest as usual. The great actor's bland, unhurried, maddeningly unperturbed line readings potently generate the sense that he's got secrets, potentially dark. He's quietly, politely paternal toward his lovely receptionist Mable (Zoey Deutch), and though she's a bit prickly at his fretting she seems to love him back. Otherwise he appears to have no life but his work. Rylance plays the role with such authority that while we watch him confidently cut and stitch and smooth fabric, we never doubt what we're seeing for second; it feels like watching a documentary.

Trouble starts when two of the hoods, who are looking for a "rat" who has been feeding information to the FBI, show up one night after a gunfight, one of them wounded, looking to English for a hideout and some impromptu field surgery. The twists and turns and bloody violence keep piling up from there, and eventually the boss (Simon Russell Beale in a fine, cliche-free turn) shows up to this messy scene and everybody starts trying to deceive and outmaneuver everybody else.

The director, Graham Moore, who co-wrote the film with Jonathan McClain, plays a lot of this for grim comedy. The style is theatrical, not just because of the single set and small cast but because of the heightened dialogue. With guns pointed at them and all manner of mayhem happening around them, the characters nonetheless launch into heartfelt, reflective monologues about their pasts. If you can accept this conceit, you're likely to find The Outfit is gripping, funny and moving.

Perhaps Moore and McClain push their luck a bit; the film has a twist or two too many. Speaking of his craft at one point in the narration, English observes that perfection, though necessary as an aspirational ideal, is never truly attainable. This movie's last ten minutes or so illustrates this perfectly, but as with one of English's suits, no one is likely to feel skimped.

DAZED ANEW

Opening this weekend:

Everybody Wants Some!!—Writer-director Richard Linklater calls this a “spiritual sequel” to his 1993 classic Dazed and Confused, and certainly the format is the same. It’s an ensemble period comedy with a soundtrack full of pop hits and a large young ensemble cast of relative unknowns, depicting the tribal rituals around getting high and getting laid.

But while Dazed and Confused was about high school and the ‘70s, Everybody Wants Some!! is about college and the ‘80s. That is to say, it’s about the beginning of college and the beginning of the ‘80s. The central figure is Jake (Blake Jenner) an incoming freshman arriving at “Southeast Texas University” a few days before classes start in 1980.

Jake’s a pitching prospect for the school’s powerhouse baseball team, so he moves into one of the dumpy houses in which his teammates live, drink, party, swap bravado and chase girls. Some of his new housemates are wound-up, obnoxious jerks, and some of them are wound-up, obnoxious nice guys, and you see Jake slip easily into differing levels of friendship with or toleration of them.

It’s striking that both here and in Dazed and Confused, Linklater has unsentimentally focused on the jocks, the sheiks, the alpha dogs, swaggering, confident and, at least by the standards of their age, sexually successful. And in both, he’s managed to make them likable, even touchingly vulnerable at times.

Because of the narrower environment, there isn’t as much variety to the dramatis personae in Everybody Wants Some!! as there was in Dazed. But Linklater does gives us a romantic interest for Jake in the form of a cute theatre student (Zoey Deutch), which allows him to take the guys out of their comfort zone to an artsy theatre party.

When I first saw Dazed and Confused back in ’93, I thought that there wasn’t a scene or a performance that wasn’t funny and completely convincing. But I remember also thinking that the pace was a little unvaried; there wasn’t much rising tension. In the many, many times I’ve seen that film since, I’ve come to see this as a strength, not a weakness—it’s central to how Linklater generates the sense of a window on the past.

Everybody Wants Some!! has this quality as well. I was in 8^th Grade in 1976, and I started college in 1980. Both of these films evoked sense memories in me of considerable intensity, and—considering that I “wanted some” as much as everybody else, and was far more frustrated than these guys—surprising affection.