Acting Worth Seeing

 A movie I saw recently gives me a great opportunity to revive this blog. I've been totally negligent in not writing here for lengthy spans of time. So here goes on a new regime.

The film I saw was The Outfit, and it features several fine actors but two stand out, perhaps because they may be the best dramatic actors working now. They are Sir Mark Rylance and Sir Simon Russell Beale. Rylance is best known in the U.S. for his Academy Award Supporting Actor performance as Russian spy Col. Rudolf Abel in Bridge of Spies. I first saw him in London twelve years ago in Jerusalem and then in New Yrk several years ago in Farinelli and the King.

He has often been heralded as today's best actor and he gives a compelling lead performance in The Outfit as a seemingly introverted controlled tailor who has emigrated from London to Chicago. As the film opens in his shop, we learn soon that for some reason his shop serves as a mail drop for gangsters.

The movie holds your attention, mainly to watch Rylance work. The story unfolds with several surprises, almost all of which are credible. In a late scene, Simon Russell Beale turns up as the don of the gang that Rylance's character has become involved with. There's a fine scene between the two of them, along with Johnny Flynn as a young gang member intent on advancing and Zoey Deutch, as Rylance's assistant in the shop who has higher ambitions as well. 

Watching Rylance and Beale, however, is super enjoyable. It's two masters making you entirely entranced into the scene. Both are physically ordinary-looking and far from prepossessing. This is not Gielgud and Olivier, except for the incredible quality of their acting.

Late last year I saw Beale in The Lehman Trilogy on Broadway where, with two other fine actors, he played several different roles in a history play, making all these characters come to life.  (See my blog for December 9, 2021, for much more on The Lehman Trilogy.)After I saw Rylance for the first time in Jerusalem in London, in which he played the leader of a bunch of doped, drunken outcasts camped on the edge of an English town, the vast extent of his range as a performer came clear. 

This was also the case when he starred as King Philip V of Spain in Farinelli and the King. He shared the stage with two alternating countertenors playing the famed Farinelli, a castrato who ruled the London stage in Handel's day. 

Beale is even less physically powerful than Rylance; he seems short and round, yet he can inhabit characters who loom large and imposing. He's on the scene only briefly in The Outfit but he always maintains his pull on your attention. 

In sum, The Outfit is totally worth seeing if only for Rylance and Beale. But all the performers are good and the screenplay is better than average, with, to my mind at least, only one major plot theme that is a stretch.