Producers: Jamie Patricof, Lynette Howell Taylor, Alex Orlovsky, Duncan Montgomery and Dylan Sellers  Director: Derek Cianfrance   Screenplay: Derek Cianfrance and Kirt Gunn   Cast: Channing Tatum, Kirsten Dunst, Ben Mendelsohn, Peter Dinklage, LaKeith Stanfield, Juno Temple, Melonie Diaz, Uzo Aduba, Lily Collias, Jimmy O. Yang, Emory Cohen, Tony Revolori, Kathryn Stamas, Kennedy Moyer and Molly Price   Distributor: Paramount Pictures

Grade: C+

It’s a testament to Channing Tatum’s innate likability that he’s able to turn a story about a thief who escapes from prison and romances a woman while holing up for months in a big-box store into something approaching a crowd-pleaser.  Derek Cianfrance’s “Roofman” isn’t really much of a movie, but Tatum’s charm makes it more palatable than one might expect.

The script by the director and Kirt Gunn is based, though with substantial changes, on the criminal career of Jeffrey Manchester, an ex-soldier who became known as “Roofman” for his modus operandi of robbing fast-food franchises, mostly McDonald’s, by breaking through the ceilings at night, waiting until their staffs arrived the next morning, then taking them prisoner and locking them in the freezer before absconding with the cash on hand.  Though armed, he was unfailingly polite.  (We’re given a taste of his style in an early sequence with Tony Revolori as the McDonald’s manager.)  We’re told that the reason for his spree, which ran from 1998 to 2000, was his determination to provide a home and good life for his estranged wife (Melonie Diaz) and three young daughters.

Caught and sentenced to prison in North Carolina, he engineered an escape in 2004 by hiding in the undercarriage of a delivery truck and—as he explains in voiceover—instead of running as far away as he could (which would almost certainly bring quick recapture) hitchhiked to nearby Charlotte to connect with his old army buddy Steve (LaKeith Stanfield), who specialized in providing forged identity papers.  Unfortunately, as the man’s girlfriend (Juno Temple) explained, Steve, having reenlisted, would be away for some months, so Jeff was forced to improvise.  He hid in the bathroom of a Toys “R” Us, emerged after closing, and made a secret nest for himself in the store, resting during the day and coming out at night to bathe, stuff himself with candy and exercise in the aisles.  Using the security cameras, he was able to keep watch over the staff’s comings and goings and even learn the passcode for the manager’s computer. 

That’s important, because the manager, Mitch (Peter Dinklage), is an arrogant martinet who lords it over clerks like simple-minded Otis (Emory Cohen).  Jeff takes a special interest in Leigh (Kirsten Dunst), a single mother whose attempts at friendship Mitch rebuffs, and whose requests for toy donations for a church drive he contemptuously rejects.  Jeff decides to take action himself, carting a bag of toys to the church, where gregarious Kami (Kathryn Stamas) insists on introducing him to Pastor Ron (Ben Mendelsohn, in a departure from his usual villainous roles) and his wife Eileen (Uzo Aduba).  Kami also insists that he come to the church’s singles lunch, where he meets Leigh in person.

That’s the start of a serious relationship, with Jeff explaining his mysterious lifestyle by fabricating a secret government job but managing to spend a good deal of time with her and her daughters Lindsay (Lily Collias) and Dee (Kennedy Moyer) after hours.  But while the latter is immediately taken with his geniality and generosity, her older sister is a tougher sell, and it takes a gift of a car with automatic transmission (cue a rambunctious scene with him showing off his recklessness during a test drive with a terrified salesman played by Jimmy O. Yang) to win her over.

The return of Steve changes things; the expense for his services requires a lot of cash, and covering his tracks some dangerous risks, including burning down a dentist’s office, breaking into a pawn shop for a gun, and robbing the Toys “R” Us of its stash of holiday loot in broad daylight—as well as abruptly dropping out of sight to start an entirely new life on Christmas Day, no less.  Disappointing Leigh and her girls in the process leads him to make a choice that proves disastrous.

Cianfrance does a reasonably good job of laying out the simplified trajectory of Manchester’s criminal career he and Gunn have constructed, even if as edited by Ron Patane and Jim Helton their account will probably leave viewers doubtful about how his scheme could ever have succeeded.  He’s also good at teasing out some of the darker aspects of the story, adding little touches of near-tragedy to what’s essentially a lighthearted caper picture.  In that he’s fortunate to have cast Dinklage as the store manager; the actor succeeds in making Mitch less a figure of inexplicable malevolence than a guy with an almost pathetic Napoleonic complex that helps to explain his domineering behavior.

In fact, one leaves understanding Mitch perhaps better than Jeff.  While the film shows what Manchester did pretty well, it’s less successful in delving into why he did it.  The most one can infer is that he held a romantic ideal of domestic life that compelled him to try to be an outstanding husband and father, first to his real family and then to his “adopted” one, even if it meant becoming a criminal to do so.  In the film Steve tries to offer some insight by noting that Jeff is an excellent observer of details but incapable of making good use of that “superpower,” and elsewhere a prison guard opines that he’s smart but also an idiot; but that’s about as deep an analysis as we’re offered.

Fortunately Channing is so ingratiating that it almost doesn’t matter that the character he’s playing remains opaque, and that apart from Dinklage and Stanfield (who makes Steve brutally honest), the rest of the cast, even Dunst as a woman bowled over by Jeff’s charisma until a horrible realization derails her hopes and Mendelsohn as the good-natured pastor come across as rather pallid.  But there are no outright embarrassments among them, and the technical crew—production designer Inbal Weinberg, costumer Erin Benach, cinematographer Andrij Parekh—use the nondescript North Carolina locations to evoke a sense of authentic time and place.  Christophe Bear’s score could have been more assertive–a rare defect nowadays, when the music is usually overbearing.

One’s left with the nagging suspicion that while “Roofman” is a fairly engaging watch, there’s something interesting going on underneath Manchester’s guarded surface that it fails to acknowledge except in the most cursory way, let alone seriously address.

But stick around for the credits, in which the real people in the Manchester saga (save for the man himself) offer their recollections and opinions.

Producers: Kath Mattock, Kevin Loader, Alex Orlovsky, Duncan Montgomery, Aleksi Bardy, Helen Vinogradov, Glenn Close and Charlie McDowell   Director: Charlie McDowell   Screenplay: Robert Jones Cast: Glenn Close, Anders Danielsen Lie, Emily Matthews, Ingvar Sigurdsson, Pekka Strang, Sophia Heikkilä and Theo Zilliacus   Distributor: Music Box Films

Grade: C+

The 1972 novel by Finnish artist and author Tove Jansson that serves as the inspiration for Charlie McDowell’s film is a period coming-of-age piece about a young girl and her widowed father coming to terms with the death of her mother while spending the summer months on the family’s vacation home on a tiny island in the Gulf of Finland.  Father and daughter are not alone, however: they’re accompanied by his aged mother, who, conscious of her own impending death, is intent on helping them reconnect emotionally before her departure.

Grandma is played by Glenn Close, and it’s her wisdom that’s integral to bringing her son (Anders Danielsen Lie), a writer whose grief leads him to brood on his loss and concentrate on his work, to open himself up again to little Sophia (Emily Matthews), while aiding the girl to understand that despite her father’s detached attitude, he still loves her.

As paced by McDowell and edited by Jussi Rautaniemi, this is basically a slow-moving three-character chamber piece; the only other people to appear are Eriksson (Ingvar Sigurdsson), a cranky old fellow who delivers a box with fireworks for a private Midsommar celebration (along with a black cat that becomes a pet for Sophia) and the Malanders (Pekka Strang and Sophia Heikkilä, along with their son Theo Zilliacus), whose modernist new house on a nearby island Grandma and Sophia visit on a brief excursion, their dismissal of a no trespassing sign happily overlooked by the family. 

Otherwise the film focuses on Grandma’s attempt to manipulate the situation, particularly through conversations with Sophia that raise memories of her own past (she was instrumental, for example, in opening the scouting experience to girls) while discussing fundamental issues—life, death, family—with her granddaughter.  But there’s one episode in which Sophia’s father is also involved.  The three go on a boating trip to another island with an abandoned lighthouse that Sophia investigates while her father remaining lolling in the boat.  A storm comes up and Sophia and Grandma take refuge in a nearby house while he struggles to bring the boat to shore; the girl feels guilty since she’d hoped for a storm to arise during the journey to the island, which she’d found excruciatingly dull.

“The Summer Book” is also a picture-postcard kind of movie, filled with shots of sunrises and sunsets in which the light dances lightly over the ocean waves, often blinding the lens of cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grovlen.  It’s a striking effect which, unfortunately, is repeated a mite too often.  But the location is a pretty one, traversed by Sophia and Grandma at length (the symbolic importance of the moss native to the island becomes a major theme) and Lina Nordqvist’s production design as well as Tiina Kaukanen’s costumes are evocative, though the time isn’t explicitly indicated.  (The songs Grandma hums and plays on an old phonograph suggest sometime earlier in the twentieth century.)  Hania Rani’s background score, with its use of single instruments—harp, glockenspiel, piano—at important points, is also attractive, though it feels rather precious.

The center of the film lies in the relationship between Sophia and her grandmother, and Close is quite fine in the latter part, both convincingly frail and yet rock-solid.  Matthews, on the other hand, is agreeably unaffected but not especially touching; perhaps the page-boy hairdo that makes her look like a miniature Prince Valiant is too much of a distraction.  Of the secondary players Danielsen Lie is no better than average and the others are mere walk-ons (Zilliacus isn’t even granted a line), but the feline that plays Fluffy is striking in its few appearances. 

Gentle and meditative, this will undoubtedly appeal to admirers of Jansson’s novel and of Glenn Close’s acting, but while evocative of time and place its deliberate pace and emphasis on visual prettiness eventually become enervating.