Derek Cianfrance’s based-on-true-life caper Roofman feels like a mainstream studio movie from 10 or 15 years ago, and that’s a good thing. Before the streaming revolution began, moviegoers were always on the lookout for a satisfying Saturday-night date movie, and Roofman ticks many of the boxes: It’s got appealing stars, one of whom can and does dance; it’s built around a sweet romance that takes off against all odds; and it’s about breaking the law and getting away with it, at least for a time, which makes for rebellious good fun. The trailer for Roofman makes the movie look like a buoyant romantic comedy, and that’s more than halfway accurate.
But about two-thirds of the way through, Roofman makes a quiet, almost imperceptible shift toward melancholy. In the past 10 years or so, we’ve been talking a lot about a crisis of masculinity in American culture, though no one has been able to define exactly what that means. Boys are said to feel less confident than their girl peers and aren’t doing as well in school. Grown men feel threatened and unsure, both in the workplace and outside it. Roofman doesn’t deal directly with those issues, but like the signature films Cianfrance made in the early 2000s, Blue Valentine (2010) and The Place Beyond the Pines (2012), it’s keyed into the ways some men feel they can never measure up, particularly when it comes to family life: they yearn for it, idealizing it maybe specifically because they’re incapable of hanging onto it. Roofman is a comedy until it isn’t, the story of a man who, by making what he calls a series of “bad choices,” is banished from family life—the thing he most desires—not once but twice.
Channing Tatum plays Jeffrey Manchester, a onetime soldier who was sentenced to 45 years in prison for robbing several McDonald’s restaurants, only to escape in 2004 in the hopes of starting a new life. Manchester managed to live for six months, undetected, in a Charlotte, N.C., Toys”R”Us store….
