🎬 #207 If It Wasn't Real You Wouldn't Believe.
While the posters make it look like a fun caper, and it is, this is a film that sneaks in surprising depth for the conceit. And might be Channing Tatum’s finest performance.
Please enjoy
Bry
FILM: Roofman
2025 Dir Derek Cianfrance
2 hrs 06 mins
Tatum plays real-life thief Jeffrey Manchester, who, after a successful run of jobs, eventually finds himself hunkered down inside a Toys R Us. Yep, as I mentioned, if this wasn’t real, you’d think they’d jumped the shark. But that’s just the skin over a vastly more deep story that sees someone torn between selfishly surviving and being a ‘good man.’ Doing the right thing at the cost of losing everything. Cianfrance has described the film as a ‘sad clown story’ about a man masking deep pain with humour and bravado.
Cianfrance’s approach deglosses the world and places events in prosaic everydayness. Contrasting with the high concept, the set and settings are based very much in overcast reality. The costume and the cast within them inhabit a lived-in feeling. Even Channing is less striking than his usual model self; he feels more of an ‘everyman’ here than he has before. What ‘wrongly’ sets him off into his life of crime is a desire to not just provide for his children but to give them the toys they want. The great storytelling irony is the place sells the toys he couldn’t provide at the film’s beginning is the same place he finds shelter when everything falls apart.
There is a commercial-industrial complex that hangs over the film. Cianfrance has logos dotted throughout the film’s landscapes [aside from the two major corporations that are central to the film]. They linger there, like a figure haunting and taunting the people who feel they can’t provide or live that - whatever that is.
This is an engrossing story that is truly wild and much more gut-wrenching than you’d expect. Enjoy :)