“ROOFMAN” My rating: B-(Prime, Paramount)
126 minutes | MPAA rating: R
Given its near-fantastical premise and a goofy poster I was expecting “Roofman” to be a lighthearted romp.
Uh, nope.
The latest from director Derek Cianfrance (“Blue Valentine,” “The Place Between the Pines”) is a true-crime yarn whose overarching emotion is one of loss.
Jeffrey Manchester (portrayed by Channing Tatum) was a former soldier who used his military training to launch an unusual criminal career. His modus operandi was to break through the roof of a fast food restaurant under cover of darkness, hide in the restroom and then emerge after the employees had arrived. Although he carried a gun Manchester was unfailingly polite, even apologetic for any trauma he was putting his victims through.
The judge wasn’t impressed by his good manners. The “Roofman” was sentenced to nearly 40 years in prison. Perhaps even worse, Manchester’s wife divorced him and refused to let his two beloved little girls even visit.
It took him a few years to hatch an escape plan; eventually Manchester broke out and took up residence in the unoccupied areas of a big box toy store in North Carolina.
Surviving on a diet of candy swiped at night when nobody was around, Manchester soon had the whole place wired with cameras and monitors so the he could watch everything that was happening from his hidey hole between the walls.
He eavesdropped on the employees, quickly concluding that the store manager (Peter Dinklage) was a dick. And Roofman was so impressed with the sideline philanthropic work of just-divorced employee Leigh Wainscott (a superb Kirsten Dunst) that he donated a whole mess of toys (stolen, obviously) to her favored charity.
Channing Tatum, Kirsten Dunst
A romance springs up between Manchester — who passes himself off as some kind of federal cop doing top secret work — and Leigh. And why not…this guy is charming, funny, considerate, and manages to bewitch not only Leigh’s impressionable young daughter but also her surly teenager. He even goes to church with them like the good family man he’s desperate to be.
Of course it cannot last. Slowly the noose of justice is tightening.
The screenplay by Cianfrance and Kirt Gunn is less caper flick than character study. You can’t help liking Jeffrey Manchester, but his unthinking acceptance of criminality and the emotional wreckage he’s likely to leave behind are more than a little worrisome. Tatum nicely limns both sides of his personality.
The real revelation here is Dunst, who gives a heartbreaking perf as a woman who thinks that at long last the right man has come along. An Oscar nomination is not out of the question.
“Roofman” features a whole bunch of heavy hitters in its supporting cast — LaKeith Stanfield, Emory Cohen, Juno Temple, Uzo Aruba and Ben Mendelsohn — but Tatum and Dunst are front and center giving the yarn its emotional oomph.
Jude Law, Vanessa Kirby
“EDEN” My rating: C (Netflix)
129 minutes | MPAA: R
There’s undoubtedly a good movie to be made from the mad story of Friedrich Ritter, but “Eden” isn’t it.
The latest from Ron Howard examines one of the weirder utopian experiments of the last century.
In 1929 German physician Friedrich Ritter traveled with his mistress Dore Strauch to the uninhabited island of Floreana in the Galapagos. His idea was to reinvent civilization on a small scale, drawing as inspiration Nietzsche’s notion of the Superman.
For the first couple of years Ritter and Strauch (portrayed in the film by Jude Law and Vanessa Kirby) got by mostly on supplies periodically dropped off by cargo vessels; Ritter devoted his days to typing out a manifesto summing up his ideas. Today we’d call him a crackpot.
As long as it was just the two of them their little settlement seemed copacetic enough. And then they got visitors. Murder and mayhem ensued,
Howard and Noah Pink’s screenplay begins with the unannounced arrival of Heinz Wittmer and his wife Margret (Daniel Bruhl, Sydney Sweeney). Inspired by sensational news reports of Ritter’s experiment, Wittmer quit his civil service job, sold everything, and shipped off with his young bride to Galapagos.
Daniel Bruhl, Sydney Sweeney
They get a chilly welcome from the arrogant Ritter, who resents the intrusion and leaves them on their own to negotiate the rigors of island life (marauding boars, unproductive soil, very little water). Against the odds, the Wittmers hang in there. If they’re not thriving, at least they figured out how to survive.
Enter Baroness Eloise von Wagner (Ana de Armas), a party girl who arrives with three sex-slave boytoys and a mad idea to build a luxury resort in Ritter’s little realm. She is arrogant and entitled, uses sex as a coercive force and isn’t above stealing food and supplies from her neighbors.
The minute the Baroness arrives the movie goes off the rails. One can’t entirely blame De Armas, who has shown her chops in films as varied as “Blonde” and “Knives Out.” As written, the character is almost comically stupid and throughly maddening…I’m not sure any actress could pull it off.
The real surprise here is Sweeney, who leaves her sex-kitten image far behind to play a rather plain and unsophisticated hausfrau who must deal with everything from giving birth alone to fighting off a pack of dogs. Turns out she’s got game (both the character and the actress).
“Eden” looks good (the cinematographer is Mathias Herndl) and there are some moments of involving physical action, but far from making a big statement the film seems satisfied with silliness.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 