Roofman

The Weight of a Plastic Crown

It is hard to know what to do with a movie that wants tenderness for a man who shoved fast-food workers into a freezer, even if he had the manners to tell them to grab a coat first. That unease is the current running through *Roofman*. The facts are outrageous enough on their own: Jeffrey Manchester, a former Army Ranger, robbed dozens of McDonald’s by dropping in through the ceiling, got caught, escaped prison, and then secretly lived inside a North Carolina Toys "R" Us for six months. It sounds like a discarded Coen brothers setup. But Derek Cianfrance is directing, and Cianfrance does not make cute little capers. *Blue Valentine* and *The Place Beyond the Pines* are bruised, openhearted movies. Watching him handle a Capra-esque heist romance feels like watching a bare-knuckle fighter switch to watercolor and still somehow leave marks.



It nearly comes off because Cianfrance understands how close comedy and sadness sit to each other. He films the toy store less as a punchline than as a fluorescent refuge for someone who has run out of places to go. The stretch where Jeffrey settles into hiding is the part I can’t shake. He rigs baby monitors to track employees. He eats peanut M&Ms for dinner. He pedals a tiny kid’s bike through empty aisles in the middle of the night, his big frame folding awkwardly over the plastic handlebars. First it’s funny. Then it’s humiliating. Then it’s just lonely. Charles Taylor, writing in *Slate*, was right to say the film is about "how our national spiritual life... can survive when they have been replaced by the temporary goods and lasting emptiness of consumer culture". The store starts to feel like a mausoleum lit by sale signage.



Channing Tatum is the reason the movie stays watchable when its sympathies get wobbly. He has always been a physical actor first, built like a bulldozer but capable of moving with dancer’s ease, and Cianfrance leans into that contradiction. Around Leigh, the toy-store employee played by Kirsten Dunst, Jeffrey puffs himself up and flashes the big easy grin. The second she looks away, the whole performance sags. You can see the maintenance cost of lying. Dunst smartly refuses to play Leigh as a fool. She plays her as someone worn down enough to ignore the warning lights because the fantasy of relief is too tempting.



Whether the film loses you probably depends on how much absolution you’re willing to hand it. The script barely lingers on the harm done to Jeffrey’s victims. It nudges him toward lovable-rogue territory when menace would be closer to the truth. I kept wishing Cianfrance would let a little more of his old ruthlessness back into the frame instead of buffing Jeffrey’s edges to suit the gentler mood. Still, there is something canny in the way the movie tempts us with the polite version of events. We are very good at choosing a charming lie over an ugly fact. *Roofman* leaves behind a weird, bruised kind of sadness. Not outrage exactly, not affection either. More like the feeling of coming out of a lovely dream and realizing your back has been aching the whole time because you fell asleep on plastic. That is a strange note for a crime romance to end on. It is also the truest thing in it.