Directed by Derek Cianfrance | Written by Cianfrance and Kirt Gunn | 126 min | ▲▲▲▲
Right off the bat, what makes Roofman so terrific is it’s another tale about America today — even as it’s set a few years in the past, there’s something undeniably current about this story, which is based in fact.
Jeffrey Manchester (Channing Tatum, winning) is a former military man from Charlotte, North Carolina with a wife and three young kids who wants to do right by them, but can’t find an honest way to earn a decent living — so he uses his observational and handyman skills to burglarize fast food joints.
He gets the Roofman nom-de-crime because he breaks in through the building’s roofs and robs the stores at opening. Unfortunately for Jeff, after 45 robberies he’s apprehended and sent to jail — this all happens in the first 20 minutes. Using his smarts, he escapes and hides out in a Toys R Us — behind a permanent sales stand.
There’s just a little bit of the Secret Mall Apartment to all of this. The movie is set right in our consumer culture, among people working tough retail jobs where they don’t get to choose their hours as they do their best to eke out some happiness with their families and their faith. The picture doesn’t go out of its way to portray Jeff as heroic, or even as a Robin Hood kind of character, but it’s easy to see him in that light. He simply couldn’t do what society had set him up to do, a society that didn’t recognize his gifts, so he took a different path.
While hiding out at the store, Manchester watches the staff, and takes a shine to Leigh (Kirsten Dunst, going from strength to strength these days). She’s a divorcee with two teen girls who runs the toy drive at her church. When her obnoxious manager, Mitch (Peter Dinklage, doing a lot with a little) won’t contribute to it, Jeff (now saying his name is John) steals a bunch of toys from the store and drops them off, and the church community (including pastor, Ben Mendelsohn) welcomes him in with open arms.
Soon, Jeff/John is dating Leigh, and enjoying getting to know her daughters, this as he continues to miss his own kids. The nature of his lie, the unsustainable present, is the tension that undercuts all the potential happiness and Jeff/John’s nice-guy authenticity, with his army buddy, career criminal Steve (LaKeith Stanfield) and his girlfriend, Michelle (Juno Temple), waiting in the wings with a possible, but expensive, way out.
The circumstances of Jeff’s predicament is what brought you to the movie, but it’s the connection between Jeff/John and Leigh that you’ll take home with you, and these actors never put a foot wrong. I hope Tatum finally gets some awards attention for his work here — you know he’d never win an Oscar for Magic Mike, no matter how good those movies are. And Dunst is one of those few child actors who’s managed to carve out a terrific career as an adult, she deserves all her flowers.
Cianfrance is probably best known for Blue Valentine and The Place Beyond The Pines, but more recently he directed The Light Between Oceans. A common thread in all these movies are deeply plausible, sometimes tragic, love stories, but I think in this one Cianfrance has given us his best work. The balance between the portrait of ordinary lives and the stuff that makes life worth living, that’s where Roofman finds its heart.
