ROOFMAN**** - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Day 8

Derek Cianfrance (BLUE VALENTINE) returns to our screens with ROOFMAN - a rather melancholy, occasionally funny, but ultimately rather whimsical and moving true crime story.  The weird thing is that the dayglow poster and goofy plot set-up make you think you are walking into a gonzo crime caper.  And yes, the film may have elements of that, but it has far more depth and emotional heft. 

Channing Tatum (MAGIC MIKE) stars as the titular Roofman - a demobbed soldier with a talent for observation and charm to spare.  Without the cash to spoil his wife and kids, he turns to armed robbery, knocking off 45 fast food restaurants.  His kind heart and general goofiness get him caught, but his aforementioned observational smarts also allow him to plot an audacious prison escape. And all this is in the first forty-five minutes of the two-hour-plus film!  The balance of the film sees Jeffrey in a kind of purgatory: out of prison but on the lam and unable to spend time with his actual family. So, he ends up hiding out in a Toys’R’Us for literally months, hacking the security systems. Even more audaciously, he ends up making friends at a local church, and romancing local single mother and employee Leigh (Kirsten Dunst).  Jeffrey now has a new identity where he is the good guy, John, and everybody loves him - even Leigh’s emo teenage daughter. The problem is, he makes the same mistakes again and again: trying to buy people’s affections.

This is a film that floats along with mild good humour and a lot of warmth, thanks mostly to Channing Tatum’s innate charm and the fact that while he may be feckless he at least he owns his mistakes. It makes for an interesting contrast with JB Mooney, the lead character in Kelly Reichardt’s THE MASTERMIND.  Where Jeffrey is a loveable rogue who takes accountability but just can’t help himself, Mooney is an entitled prick.  They are both simultaneously brilliant and stupid.  But the former actually cares for his kids, and indeed seems to be a rather warm-hearted individual more generally.

I thoroughly enjoyed this film, not least for its heavy 1990s nostalgia and a lovely pair of cameos from Peter Dinklage as the dickish store manager and Ben Mendelssohn as the parish priest.  Kirsten Dunst brings so much heart and warmth and intelligence to everything she does, and Tatum is so charming, that it’s just a fun two hours.  Not a rollicking comedy as the marketing campaign would have you believe, but perhaps more worth your time for all that. 

ROOFMAN has a running time of 126 minutes. It played Toronto 2025. It was released in the USA last Friday.

THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES

Writer-director Derek Cianfrance follows up his critically acclaimed, intimate, raw portrait of an unraveling marriage, BLUE VALENTINE, with what he describes with a male melodrama about fathers and sons.  Both movies are an unflinching examination of real people making bad decisions for the best of reasons. But where VALENTINE feels brutally real, PINES has a self-conscious symmetry - a deliberate interweaving of plot points and characters that lifts us out of the real and into the archetypal.  This is a movie that is architectural - whose structural underpinnings are it's point - and that willingness to put the whale-bones outside of the flesh almost, but not quite, threaten to obscure our emotional response to the material. That it doesn't, speaks to the fine performances at the heart of the movie.

As the movie opens, we see a bravura tracking shot of Ryan Gosling's motorcycle stuntman, Luke, walking through the back-alleys of a circus, his small-town fans cheering him as he enters the tent. Three stuntmen will ride bikes over and around each other in the tight confines of a rotating metal framed ball  - an elaborate metaphor for the feat that Cianfrance is trying to pull of with this film.  

The first act of the film is Luke's story.  He rolls back into town to find he fathered a baby after a one night stand with Eva Mendes' Romina. She's living with Kofi (Mahershala Ali) - an archetypal good father who can provide everything Luke can't - a house, stability, commitment.  Somewhat predictably, Luke falls into bank robbery, tutored by Ben Mendelson's Robin, with immediate success but ultimately catastrophic results.   The hackneyed tale of a heist gone wrong is elevated by Ryan Gosling's absolute commitment to the role, the high-energy cinematography, the creeping sense of foreboding and, perhaps surprisingly, Eva Mendes.  There's a scene where Romina is asking Luke how he's going to take care of her, and Luke begs her not to talk down to him, not to assume he's as worthless as everyone else thinks he is, that is absolutely heartbreaking.  It's heartbreaking because we see how desperate Luke is to break the cycle of absence and neglect that he lived through, and heartbreaking because we know that Romina loves Luke, but that she loves her son, and his future, more.  

In the second act of the film we focus on Avery (Bradley Cooper) - the cop that gets shot in an altercation with Luke.  He's also a young father, also trying to do right but caught up in nefarious shit. His story is also mired in predictability - Ray Liotta cast as a corrupt cop - and the pace is much slower.  I have always thought Bradley Cooper a good actor, but at first I thought his performance in this segment fell rather flat. I just wasn't convinced he'd found the character. And then I realised that this was exactly what we were meant to be falling, because Avery hasn't found his character.  He's a guy constantly defining himself against other's expectations.  His father, a judge, wants him to be a lawyer. The police chief wants him to be a hero.  The rozzers want him to take the cash. And he thinks he wants to just be a good dad.  Turns out, he wants more. It's a subtle performance, and one that's nicely complemented by Rose Byrne as his wife.

In the final act of the movie, we fast forward to the present day, where Luke and Avery's sons are now teenagers at the same public school, although from radically different economic backgrounds. Indeed, Avery is now a man of some power and complacency, and his son  AJ (Emory Cohen) is a sinister, drug-fuelled bully.  Already exploited by AJ, when Luke's son Jason (Dale DeHaan) figures out their fathers' relationship he flips into a spiral that brings Avery face to face with his past in a lurid, melodramatic denouement that is at once utterly unrealistic and majestic.  Bradley Cooper is masterful in his final scene.

What should we make of this film? Clearly, it's macro structure forces it into highly stylised pairings and plot points, but this is not a weakness.  It gives colour and provocation, and doesn't alienate us because each section is so filled with deep emotion and finely shaded moral dilemmas.  In other words, this movie has heart as well as style.  In fact, it's something of a tour de force. 

THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES played Toronto 2012 and is already on release in the USA, France, Denmark, Finland and Spain. It opens this weekend in Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, Singapore, Norway, and Sweden. It opens on April 12th in the UK, Ireland, Greece and Lithuania.  It opens on April 18th in Russia. It opens on May 2nd in Croatia; on May 9th in Australia; on May 24th in Poland, Taiwan and Japan; on June 14th in Turkey; on June 20th in Germany and on June 28th in Mexico.

The film has a running time of 140 minutes and is rated R in the USA.

BLUE VALENTINE

BLUE VALENTINE is a justifiably praised indie drama about a young couple falling in and out of love. The stories of their meeting in the early twenties, and their disintegrating marriage six years later, and presented linearly, but inter-cut. Seeing the couple in their early heady romance juxtaposed so directly with their later frustrations brings an added pathos to what would have already been an incredibly affecting, brutally closely observed story.

Ryan Gosling (HALF NELSON) and Michelle Williams (WENDY AND LUCY) both give bravura performances as Dean and Cindy, perfectly rendering portraits of their characters at two stages of life. Gosling's Dean starts off as a charming, spontaneous, caring young man, stuck in a blue-collar job but apparently not asking anything more from life. No surprise then that Cindy - stuck in a loveless home - is drawn to his open-ness and warmth - so much so that when she falls pregnant she is willing to shelve her career ambitions to make a life with him. Six years later, and Cindy is tired and frustrated - a dutiful mother and working woman. Dean's spontaneity and charm now strike her as infantile, and though faithful to the idea of marriage, she has no desire for him. Meanwhile, Dean is seemingly so content with the idea of being a husband and father that he has no desire to push himself any further in life, or any real comprehension as to his wife's new-found coldness toward him. By marrying Cindy he has achieved more than he could have ever dreamed of - the pretty middle-class girl - and perhaps the greatest sadness of the film is that while Cindy can see more, has been raised to try for more, Dean has never been given that sense of possibility.

The bold performances are matched by documentary film-maker Derek Cianfrance's choices with the camera and editing. He shoots the couple in two very different styles in each period of their life - the courtship is in wide-angled Super 16 that always seems a little bright and grainy - like watching old cine-films of your childhood. It adds to the feeling that these are old memories. The present is shot with long lenses on DV, and it feels like the camera is always positioned to give us the feeling that the two characters are caught in a confined space, and yet never in the same focus when in the frame. It's as though the camera lens is literally entrapping them in a shared space but perpetual misunderstanding.

The overall effect is one of uncomfortable voyeurism. The movie is almost an endurance test. Because we are charmed by the couple's courtship - because they are both essentially good and charming and caring people - it becomes absolutely gruelling to watch them inflict hurt after hurt upon each other for no typically Hollywood-reason - no distinct cause - but just because they have grown up, or haven't in different ways.

BLUE VALENTINE played Sundance, Cannes, Telluride, Toronto and London 2010. It is currently on release in the US, Australia, Malaysia and Canada. It opens in the UK this Friday, in Portugal on February 3rd and in Sweden on April 1st. Both Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams have been nominated for Golden Globes.