Director Derek Cianfrance’s Roofman recounts the true story of former Army Ranger turned unlikely serial robber Jeffrey Manchester (Channing Tatum). Given the titular nickname due to his modus operandi of breaking and entering through the roofs of the businesses he would steal from, the man was eventually apprehended in 2000 after burgling dozens of McDonald’s restaurants over a multi-year period.
Manchester, though, wasn’t the dangerous menace to society that one might assume. On the contrary, he was a rather nice guy, as attested to by those who were held up by him. Tatum, then, plays Jeffrey as a bit of a loveable doofus—incredibly smart but also stupid, as he’s regularly described throughout Roofman—and Cianfrance’s breezy approach to the film complements the demeanor of its protagonist, for better and for worse.
The bulk of Roofman takes place in the wake of Jeffrey escaping from prison in 2004. After an attempt to contact his family goes south when his ex-wife (Melonie Diaz) hangs up on him, he desperately searches for somewhere to hide out, eventually breaking into a Toys ‘R’ Us store in Charlotte, North Carolina. So begins a months-long residence where Jeffrey intrepidly sets up a makeshift home for himself in a vacant space behind one of the walls of the store.
At night, Jeffrey emerges to procure M&Ms and baby food for sustenance and ride around the aisles on a children’s bike, activities which the film depicts in kooky montages. Cianfrance has fun spotlighting the nostalgic consumerism of the early aughts, with period-specific product placement, from Xbox games to Tickle Me Elmo, incorporated into Jeffrey’s stealthy jaunts.
After successfully figuring out how to plug into the store’s security system, Jeffrey begins to take an interest in the lives of the employees, particularly hard-working single mom Leigh Wainscott (Kirsten Dunst). Taken by Leigh’s good nature, particularly in the face of her grouchy boss, Mitch (Peter Dinklage), Jeffrey jumps at the chance to slip out of the store with some merchandise and bring it to a local church toy drive that she’s organizing. From here, he begins to get involved in the community, calling himself “John Zorn” and pretending to be a government agent with a classified job, and quickly woos and falls into a relationship with Leigh.
Tatum and Dunst have an easy chemistry, which goes some way toward selling the routine rom-com path that the film goes down. As Jeffrey gets closer with Leigh and her two daughters (Lily Collias and Kennedy Moyer), he begins to have some semblance of a normal life, even though it puts him at risk of being recaptured. Watching all of this, you know that it’s only a matter of time before Jeffrey’s true identity will be revealed to the woman who’s come to trust him.
Despite Tatum’s winning everyman charisma and the film adhering more or less closely to the facts of Manchester’s deception, the emotional impact of the inevitable climax is dulled by the formulaic nature of almost everything that precedes it. That and the cognitive dissonance of Jeffrey becoming increasingly and happily involved in Leigh’s daughters’ lives while essentially being forced to forget about his own children whom he can’t return to.
In The Place Beyond the Pines, Cianfrance evocatively captured how criminal acts have ripple effects across generations, and that theme is ripe for similar exploration in Roofman. But Jeffrey’s young children and his relationship to them are only really up for discussion here when it’s narratively convenient, in a moment that mostly underscores the obvious desire by the filmmakers to not complicate the feel-good template of the material. Manchester may in fact have been polite, but Cianfrance’s film doesn’t convince you that it needed to be as well.
Score:
Cast: Channing Tatum, Kirsten Dunst, Ben Mendelsohn, LaKeith Stanfield, Juno Temple, Melonie Diaz, Uzo Aduba, Lily Collias, Jimmy O. Yang, Peter Dinklage Director: Derek Cianfrance Screenwriter: Derek Cianfrance, Kirt Gunn Distributor: Paramount Pictures Running Time: 126 min Rating: R Year: 2025 Venue: Toronto International Film Festival
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