Roofman

October 24 – 30

Friday 1:30 & 7 pm
Saturday 7 pm
Sunday 1:30 & 7 pm
Monday 7 pm
Tuesday 7 pm
Wednesday 3:30
Thursday 7 pm 

Rated PG – 2hr 3min

Comedy / Crime

In Roofman, Channing Tatum and Kirsten Dunst are a match made in crime comedy heaven. This true-life tale of a gentleman thief sees ‘Blue Valentine’ director Derek Cianfrance step away from the misery of his earlier films – but not the heart. When you need someone to play a criminal who’s easy to forgive, you call up Channing Tatum. He’s the big kid with the big soul, whose six-pack and close shave play in direct contrast to his dancer’s grace. You’ll see him bounce around like a lemur, but always with that little twinkle in his eye that says, “don’t break my heart, please. I’m fragile”. He’s one reason Roofman works as well as it does. The second is his onscreen romantic partner, Kirsten Dunst, who’s forever honest and unadorned in her work, in a way that ensures her character here never feels like a mother substitute, or the saint who dares put up with all this. We’re simply watching two people who like each other very much, barrelling towards a titanium wall obstacle.

Tatum’s Manchester keeps insisting through the movie that he’s a nice guy, and mostly, he is. He cares about people; he doesn’t want to hurt anyone. But Tatum makes us see the cracks in Manchester’s thinking—at the root of his behavior is a particularly selfish kind of deception. There are lots of sequences of Tatum’s Manchester dancing—occasionally in the buff—through the deserted nighttime aisles of that Toys”R”Us Store. (If we can’t see Tatum cast in a musical, this will have to be the next best thing.) But Tatum is more than just your garden-variety charmer. Occasionally, you catch a chilly vacancy in his eyes, and you understand that Manchester believes that because he deserves happiness, he can just take it. His impulses aren’t pure; they amount to a kind of entitlement. And you feel sympathy for him even so.

There’s an emotional push-pull that makes Roofman work. Dunst’s presence is key here. In a pivotal scene, Leigh’s cheerful radiance—her joy after having finally landed what she thinks is a nice guy—gives way to a cloud cover of doubt and suspicion; Dunst plays the scene as subtly as if, in the moment, she were watching the moon drift away forever. Roofman is partly a lark: it’s fun to watch a clever, likable guy like Tatum’s Manchester beat the system. But everything Manchester does is linked to his warped sense of what makes a man a man. He even says aloud, more than once, that he recognizes his big mistake: he tried to give his “families” everything money could buy, when all they really wanted was him. He triumphed in beating the system for a time. But the truly unachievable task was outrunning himself.