Channing Tatum stars as Jeffrey Manchester, an escaped convict hiding out at a North Carolina Toys “R” Us, in new movie Roofman.Photo Credit: Davi Russo/Paramount
Roofman
Directed by Derek Cianfrance
Written by Derek Cianfrance and Kirt Gunn
Starring Channing Tatum, Kirsten Dunst and Ben Mendelsohn
Classification 14A; 126 minutes
Opens in theatres Oct. 10
Derek Cianfrance can be a gimmicky and oppressively serious filmmaker. Think Blue Valentine and The Place Beyond the Pines, screechy and miserabilist portraits of working-class families that confuse severity with authenticity while leaning on their time-hopping structures for profundity.
I can’t help but think someone told Cianfrance to lighten up a little, because his latest, Roofman, a movie that has Channing Tatum dancing in his briefs Risky Business-style through a toy store, appears to be the result. The totally likeable but wobbly comic crime caper, based on an absurd true story, has Tatum – as effortlessly charming as ever – playing an earnest man-child who tries to reinvent life on the run as a romcom.
Tatum works up some lovely chemistry with Kirsten Dunst, who brings an easygoing warmth so rarely felt in a Cianfrance joint. She plays Leigh Wainscott, a single mom who thinks she’s in a relationship with a government employee who is secretive about his work and address because that’s just part of what makes his job sexy. Tatum’s Jeffrey Manchester is actually an escaped convict hiding out for months at a North Carolina Toys “R” Us, daring to roam around in public as a nice new guy in town named John.
In real life, Manchester, whom the media dubbed “Roofman,” was hiding in both the Toys “R” Us and adjacent Circuit City. He traded a prison cell for little hidden crevices that he equipped with baby monitors to surveil his surroundings. He’d been surviving on baby food stolen off the shelves for so long that you understand why he’d eventually sneak out into public seeking home cooking and companionship.
Manchester, who acquired a lot of his survival skills from serving in the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, is said to be responsible for robbing more than 40 McDonalds restaurants in the late nineties. His M.O.: rappelling down a hole he cuts in the roof and using his familiarity as a former McDonald’s employee with shift routines and store layouts to catch staff by surprise. He would then politely ask everyone to take their coats to the freezer, where he would temporarily lock them up while he got away with all the cash.
Kirsten Dunst, right, plays Tatum’s love interest Leigh Wainscott, a single mom who thinks she’s in a relationship with a government employee.Davi Russo/The Associated Press
His courteousness with the staff – as if he was building some sense of working-class camaraderie – was well reported. After he was caught, and sentenced to 45 years, he used that same well-behaved demeanour to get the best of prison security and mount his escape in 2004.
That’s when the bulk of Roofman is set, right around the time Dunst was on the big screen in Spider-Man 2 (playing a woman dealing with the double life of another character who would rappel down into people’s lives) and Tatum was about to break into the movies with his Coach Carter performance. It’s worth pointing out that before he became an actor, Tatum had worked as a model, a stripper and … a roofer!
Tatum is an easy fit for this role, not just because he knows his way around shingles, but because he’s so good at using his appealing looks and soft-spoken but confident and flattering manner to disarm.
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But the performance also feels like recycled elements from Tatum’s superior collaborations with Steven Soderbergh, such as Magic Mike, which was based on the actor’s experiences as a stripper/roofer trying to reinvent himself as an entrepreneur, and the heist movie Logan Lucky, in which he plays a recently laid off construction worker out for retribution. Those films were much better at absorbing Americana into their stories about working-class people bumping up against the limitations of capitalism.
Roofman, which is drab and grey – and typical of Cianfrance on that front – can’t capitalize on Tatum’s surface appeal and those working-class tensions in the same way, even when gently grasping at similar ideas. The struggle for Cianfrance is getting the tone right with a story about a superficially chivalrous thief who nurtures a sense of kinship with the people he ultimately victimizes.
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Tatum’s Manchester, for instance, sneaks into the Toys “R” Us manager’s office at night to mess with employee schedules to give Dunst’s single mom the time off she needs to be with her vulnerable daughters. In real life, Leigh never worked at the Toys “R” Us, and Manchester messed with the schedules to benefit his own clandestine movements.
That’s just one example of the movie’s gentle manipulations to favour Manchester and refashion his selfish acts with a Robin Hood-esque nobility. Meanwhile, the harm Manchester brings to his own child, whom he is forced to abandon early on, and Leigh’s daughters, when he ingratiates himself into their lives, is acknowledged but not meaningfully dealt with.
It’s as if keeping it light and resisting the severity of his previous work has Cianfrance pulling a Manchester, pretending to be a crowd-pleaser – and almost getting away with it.
