Roofman review – Channing Tatum and Kirsten Dunst lift fact-based crime caper

7 hours ago 5

There’s considerable movie star charm powering Roofman, a mid-level comedy drama set in the mid-2000s and starring two actors who were stars around that time. It’s also reminiscent of a film that would have been released then too, a brief glimpse of a Blockbuster Video store making it easy to imagine picking this one up for a rainy afternoon rental.

On those terms, it’s perfectly watchable, engaging enough to keep us from pressing stop, if not quite enough to make us want to press rewind once it’s over. It’s based on the stranger-than-fiction tale of Jeffrey Manchester, played by Channing Tatum, an ex-military father-of-three who just can’t quite find his place in the civilian world. His old army buddy Steve (Lakeith Stanfield) reminds him of his particular skill for observation, urging him to put it to good use. Instead, after disappointing his daughter once again with an underwhelming birthday present, he decides to use it for something less well-advised, robbing not one but 45 McDonald’s, going in through the roof and making enough to give his family the life they deserve.

Writer-director Derek Cianfrance, and co-writer Kirt Gunn, speed through his descent into crime a little too fast, giving him a hard-to-grasp direct line from letting his daughter down to mass robbery. What kept him convinced of his new career was his cordial manner during the hold-ups, politely treating employees and ensuring a strict avoidance of violence. He was captured and given 45 years in prison, a term that finally pushed his understandably fatigued wife away.

His knack for observing the small details sees him hatch an ambitious escape plan, fooling the guards and landing back on the outside. Determined not to go back, he finds the perfect place to hide until Steve can help him with a fake passport: a Toys R Us store. He first hides in the roof, of course, before making his way down and holing up in an unseen section of the store, snacking on M&Ms and baby food and spying on the staff (managed by a convincingly mean and officious Peter Dinklage). One of them is Leigh (Kirsten Dunst), a single mother he can’t stop himself from helping, a slippery slope that sees him craft a fake identity, getting himself into deeper and deeper trouble.

It might be hard to believe – a wanted felon going unnoticed while he romances a single mother and charms a local church (led by Uzo Aduba and an unusually uncreepy Ben Mendelsohn) – but most of the facts of Roofman are bizarrely true. It sometimes feels like Cianfrance, whose background errs darker from his emotionally ruinous divorce tale Blue Valentine to crime drama The Place Beyond the Pines, could have turned this into more of a thriller, an almost sociopathic liar hiding a criminal background while spinning an unstoppable web of fibs. But Roofman is a warmer, softer film, as polite and eager to please as Jeffrey himself. Cianfrance even brings back his Blue Valentine composer Christopher Bear (of Grizzly Bear) to add a gentler jaunt to his often sadder sound (his score is also wonderfully reminiscent of a robust studio film from the 2000s).

It works mostly because of Tatum and Dunst, a rare on-screen pairing of single parents in their 40s, both trying to navigate a stressful situation, hard enough even without the criminality. There’s real chemistry there, initially of an amusingly confused nature as she mistakes his disarmingly unthreatening manner as him being gay. The by-the-numbers build of their relationship, as he tries to win over her surly teenage daughter, could do with something that felt a little more specific and lived-in but they work hard to sell it, especially Dunst who disappears into it all without the merest sign of effort, one of her better performances in a deservedly bountiful new career period. I found myself rooting for her but maybe less so for the roofman himself, a character whose crimes and lies and bad decisions are never as charming or understandable as the film tries to make them and as the authorities close in, it’s made even harder to care if he makes it, a force of chaos making life harder for those around him.

Another, more textured film might have tried to paint him as more than just lovable rogue but Roofman is too focused on making us feel good rather than bad. I would have settled for conflicted.