Review by Andrew Swafford
When I walked out of the Roofman premiere at TIFF, my main thought was that it would be perfect for a release over the Christmas holidays: not only does the climactic stretch of the film take place at Christmas, but it also has a crowdpleasing family-movie vibe (some light R-rated content notwithstanding) that made me eager to show it to my mom. The film’s distributor, Paramount, elected instead to release it theatrically in early October, but after watching it over some random streaming service with my family on Christmas morning, I maintain that I was right: it made for perfect holiday viewing, and mom raved about Roofman for days. That’s worth more than any critical analysis I could offer here, I think.
Nevertheless, my role as a critic beckons: Roofman is a lighthearted true-crime story set in the late-90s about a broke, divorced, exmilitary dad named Jeffrey Manchester. Played here by Channing Tatum with all the star’s usual charming charisma and playful physicality, Manchester attempts to provide for his daughter by robbing dozens of McDonald’s restaurants, cutting holes in the roof to make his trademark entrance. He is quickly caught and imprisoned, but he leverages his Special Forces training to break out and take refuge in an unnoticed alcove of a Toys R Us (managed by a delightfully callous Peter Dinklage), where he lives undetected for months. This would all be wacky enough without the added element of his falling in love with one of the store employees, even going so far as to become part of her church community and serve as a temporary father figure for her two adolescent daughters. His love-interest, Leigh Moore, is played excellently by the always-wonderful Kirsten Dunst, who brings a fully believable, down-to-earth seriousness to her role as a southern single mom.
The story here is pretty much all what really happened, as the end credits montage of real-life footage attests – and it’s a fun change-of-pace for the true crime genre, which is generally defined by ultra-gory stories of prurient sexual predation. Adding to the sense of authenticity here is the fact that the film features many non-actors playing themselves, and it was all shot in the story’s actual location of Charlotte, North Carolina, where Cinematary’s own Zach Dennis covered the story of the film’s release on several different occasions for The Charlotte Observer. With this in mind, it’s a surprisingly respectful look at the everyday lives of lower-middle-class southerners, who are all too often defined by the most hateful and bigoted among us. That bigotry certainly exists in the south (as it does everywhere), but what this movie captures so well is that most southerners are just kind-hearted folks struggling to get by.
One of the real-life details unfortunately left out of the story, however, is that Manchester eventually moved locations from his sanctuary in Toys R Us to a nearby Circuit City, which I think would have been a fantastic inclusion. Not only would such a tech-heavy locale allow us to see Manchester pull off more delightful feats of screwball engineering (like using baby monitors to set up his own set of closed circuit security cameras), but it would also bring into even clearer focus the backdrop of economic precarity that gives this film a sense of depth. Like Toys R Us and Blockbuster Video (which gets a tragically passing glance at one point in the film), Circuit City is one of many corporate franchises to not survive into our current era of scorched earth hypercapitalism. If they can’t make it, what hope is there for the downwardly mobile people who populate the world of this film? Kirsten Dunst’s character has a Master’s Degree, and yet she works at a Toys R Us; Channing Tatum was a highly valued Special Forces operative, and yet the opening scene sees him stealing from McDonald’s so that he can afford to buy his daughter the bike she wants from her birthday.
Looked at from this vantage point, the film seems like it might be a dour affair – but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Roofman is frothy and fun, with snappy pacing and extremely likeable characters brought to life by fantastic performers you already know and love. It is, again, a movie you can watch with your mom. I think the breeziness of the viewing experience has led to most critics being fairly tepid in their praise of Roofman, but personally, I don’t see why we shouldn’t praise a movie for simply being a very good version of what it is: in this case, a goofy true-crime caper with broad appeal. It’s not the most challenging or innovative film I saw at the festival by any stretch of the imagination, but in a film landscape that is increasingly being hollowed out by the same market forces that swallowed up Toys R Us, I think we need plenty of well-made movies like this too