KWIF=Kent's week in film. An odd drama, plus more Coens, more Nick and Nora and more teenagers foiling death's design.
This Week:
Roofman (2025, d. Derek Cianfrance - in theatre)
Inside Llewyn Davis (2013, d. Joel and Ethan Coen - Crave)
The Thin Man Goes Home (1941, d. - DVD)
Final Destination 3 (2005, d. Glen Morgan - rental)
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If one were to attend
Roofman based on the trailer, or even the poster, one would think that
Roofman was this year's
Hit Man, a "based on a true story" film that turns real events into a sort of whimsical romantic comedy. The story of a down-on-his-luck veteran who turns to breaking into chain stores and fast food restaurants only to go on the lam by hiding out in a Toys R Us where he falls for one of the employees sounds like it should be an amusing, maybe even silly fun time at the movies.
But director Cianfrance, who co-writes the screenplay with Kurt Gunn, is much, much, much more interested in the human angle than finding much funny about the situation at all. This is a true story of something that happened to a real person, and unlike Richard Linklater with Hit Man, Cianfrance isn't interested in sugar coating the story.
Channing Tatum has managed to get away from the meathead/pretty-boy perception that haunted his early career, despite still often playing meatheads and pretty boys. In between such roles he finds interesting projects that challenge him as an actor, and working with directors he likes, having clocked in time with Tarantino, the Coens, the Wachowskis and Soderbergh (so much Soderbergh). Still, in Jeffrey Manchester, the titular "Roofman", we find Tatum at his most vulnerable and soulful, walking a tightrope between sweet and sketchy with lots of fumbles to either side.
Manchester is an Army vet, separated from his wife with alternate weekends with his kids. He's broke with no prospects and just can't seem to figure out how to get a leg up. His "super power", an exceptional innate skill, is observation. He sees patterns and details that are either invisible to the rest of us, or we take for granted. Someone with such a skill can be very effective in many situations, including crime, which is what Manchester turns to. His series of break-ins in North Carolina become notorious over a two year span, but it's afforded Manchester a new house and won his family back...until he gets found out and goes to jail.
Tatum provides voice over throughout the film largely to give insight into how Manchester executes his crimes, the observations made and the patience needed accomplish the task, including describing how he broke out of prison, and eluded immediate capture by hiding out in a toy store. Unfortunately the narration doesn't extend to Manchester's thought process in entering a relationship with Leigh Wainscott (Kirstin Dunst), a store employee who he has been observing during store hours over baby cameras he set up. He meets her in person at her church and winds up on a date with her under a fake name and a government employee doing "undercover" work he can't discuss. But he's beefy and charming and soon they're a couple. He meets Leigh's teenage daughters, showering the family with stolen goods, or goods bought with money from pawned video games from Toys R Us.
Not too long ago, we would be made to feel sorry for Manchester. A film from, say, 2010, would paint him as a nice guy who went through hard times, and made the only decision he could. Such a film would root for Manchester to be free and stay free, root for the coupling of Leigh and "John Zorn", despite the cloud of deceit hanging over the whole proceedings (hell, Hit Man even did that...last year). But this isn't that film. This film is all too aware that, as nice a guy as Manchester may seem, he's still being selfish even in his generosity. His attachment to Leigh and her family is, at least in part, a substitute for missing his own. While the film doesn't heighten or exacerbate the tension of it all, playing it pretty naturally, it's still exceptionally tense if you have any empathy for Leigh. Manchester's "victims" of his robberies all describe him as, really, a nice guy underneath, but there's nothing nice about deceit, and when Manchester is finally found out, it is a relief, more than anything.
Alongside exceptional performances from Tatum and Dunst, and Dinklage as the store manager, Ben Mendelsohn and Uzo Aduba play the pastor and his wife at the church, LaKeith Stanfield plays Manchester's army buddy while Juno Temple plays Stanfield's girlfriend while Tony Revolori and Jimmy O. Yang both have smaller cameos. These are quite some notable names for what amount to fairly nominal roles.
It's a good film, but certainly not what it was sold as. There's a few situational chuckles, but by and large it's all played very dramatically. Even the scene where Manchester is taking one of his "boys room" showers and is accidentally discovered by the store manager (Peter Dinklage), it could have been a really big comedic set pieces, but instead it's played exceptionally tense as Tatum, fully nude, tries to retreat to his hidey hole, and Dinklage is clearly traumatized by the encounter. It's the moment that spells the beginning of the end for Manchester's freedom and the new life he's deceptively built for himself.
There's an exceptional coda to the film, though, that provides the audience with both resolution and even a little insight into the real Manchester. Interviews and news footage of the real "Roofman" and some of the people whose lives he touched play during the closing credits, and, again provide more context and a sense of closure to the story at hand.
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I have been going through the films of the Coen Brothers week-by-week for the past three months now, and we've finally hit the point in their filmography where I've already done a review on this blog for the film that I've watched this week.
It's been over 11 years since I last watched Inside Llewyn Davis, and my memories of the film were mere flashes, out of context moments that told me nothing of the experience of watching the film. I didn't re-read my review until after watching the movie. Spelling mistakes aside, and maybe a bit of reassessing my Coen's preamble, I was surprised at how spot on my review from over a decade ago mirrored my repeat experience with the film, right down to the examination about whether it was a time loop film or not (it might be, but probably not).
In that review, I talked about how it was under-appreciated by critics. In the time since, it's been added to the Criteron Collection and has been held up as another of the Coens' many, many masterpieces. It gets into the director's interests of being behind the scenes of the performing arts, following this struggling musician as he tries to make space for himself and his interests in the world. There's shades of Barton Fink without the heightened reality, this is a very naturalistic experience.
Llewyn (Oscar Isaac), it was much clearer to me in this second viewing, is a traumatized man and his response to the world is to push it away, despite his best intentions. He's an asshole, and he knows it, but he doesn't know how to be any other way, because he's angry at the world. You would think the wake-up call would be taking a road trip with jazz musician Roland Turner (John Goodman) and his driver, beat poet Johnny Five (Garrett Hedlund...watching a lot of this guy of late). Turner is the vision of Llewyn 30 years in the future: a junkie who has an opinion on everything and hates pretty much all of it.
Llewyn tries to abandon the life, the music, and just settle, but the music world proves that it isn't done with him, and karma gets him back on stage with a guitar in his hands.
My big realization watching this film, besides admiring how goddamned talented and appealing a performer Oscar Isaac is), is that I'm really, really not a folk music guy. I don't find a guy and his acoustic guitar or a trio harmonizing (with an acoustic guitar), or any of the folksy instruments and "traditional" songs terribly appealing. I appreciate them in the moment, but it's never something I'm going to put any effort into seeking out. There's a reason I haven't watched this film in over a decade (and it's been even longer since I saw A Mighty Wind) despite thinking it's a pretty great movie with phenomenal performances.
No Deakins' cinematography here, as Bruno Debonnel steps in with a very natural sensibility to the proceedings. There's no gloss here, and it's often all about the immediacy of the music. It's desaturated into greys and blues and browns, all feeling like very late fall or early winter in New York (and Chicago), cold and somewhat unforgiving. Also missing from the usual Coens production, Carter Burwell, as the music in the film is all performances, with frequent collaborator T-Bone Burnett working with Issac to arrange his performances, among others. It's a standout film in the Coens filmography primarily because it feels so different, both musically and visually, but that said it feels like the proper extension to the shift the Coens had been making since The Ladykillers. You can definitely see, with No Country for Old Men, True Grit, and A Serious Man how this fits into this phase of their career.
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It still kind of ruffles my feathers that the "Nick and Nora" movies are called
The Thin Man series and the title of each film seems to be referencing Nick as the titular "Thin Man", when the thin man of the first movie was the suspect of the murder case. Increasingly the titles of the series make less and less sense.
In The Thin Man Goes Home, Nick and Nora travel by train to Nick's hometown for a visit with his doting mother and disapproving father. Nick, a near 50-year-old man at this point, regresses somewhat upon returning home. His father thinks him lazy and hard-drinking, so, Nick decides to switch from his all-martini diet to drinking cider, but still runs afoul of situations that leads his father to think him tipsy off his ass.
Nick's arrival in town causes a stir. It's a tight community and, all told, a peaceful one. But as we know about America of the 1900's (especially through the works of David Lynch) beneath the placid normalcy of everyday America lies a deep, dark undercurrent that most just ignore is even there. To acknowledge it is to give it power, to summon it forth. Nick's mere arrival has Joe and Jane Normal thinking Nick's there on a case and it may involve them. Nora, the muckraker she is, adds fuel to the fire and all but fabricates a case for Nick to work on. She really wants Nick to show off his detective skills to his father and finally impress him, like he constantly impresses her.
When a man is murdered by a sniper's rifle on Nick's parent's very doorstep, Nick can't help but get involved. Like all the "Think Man" movies, the cast expands and the actual crime spirals, leading to a gathering of all the possible suspects in one room where Nick sorts it all out. This film, so aware of its proceedings, gets downright meta as Nora explains to Nick's parents exactly how it will all shake out, including maybe a gunshot or two take at Nick.
Missing completely from this endeavour is Nick Jr. At first I thought the series was just outright abandoning him as if he never existed at all, but turns out he loves kindergarten so much that his parents couldn't dare to pull him from it to visit his grandparents (uh huh).
In prior Thin Man sequels there have been sit-com-esque set-ups or sequences that sometimes feel at odds with the murder and crime aspects of the film, but here, the tone remains pretty well balanced throughout. It never fully abandons its comedic elements for a more stone-faced approach to the investigation. If anything, it may go too far with the comedy as it tries to introduce physical comedy and slapstick, it turns out, it's not one of Willam Powell's strengths.
Still a fun time is always had in the company of Nick and Nora Charles.
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With
Final Destination 2, it felt like a step away from the intensity of the first film in favour of the delights of seeing annoying people get killed via incredibly elaborate cosmic jokes played on them. As well,
FD2 really tried to figure out how to connect the first two films in wholly unnecessary and clumsy ways that just contributed to its delightful lunacy. I think my
write-up last week didn't hit hard enough how damn entertaining the sequel was because of its ridiculousness, not in spite of it. As it lingered in my brain, I enjoyed it more and more.
I was excited to see than the makers of the first film were back, and I was keen to see what X-Files veterans James Wong and Glen Morgan had in store for a third entry of teenagers trying to escape death.
It's as if Wong and Morgan thought the ludicrousness of the second film was a flaw, with Final Destination 3 they really tried to bring back the ominousness, the foreboding dread of death and its designs. It doesn't work so well.
A young Mary Elizabeth Winstead leads the cast as Wedny, the one who has the vision of a Canadian roller coaster ride gone haywire. Next to the crazy highway chaos of the second film, a roller coaster malfunction isn't anywhere near as exciting, as wild as the deaths in Wendy's vision are. The roller coaster accident itself is a tricky bit of filmmaking. Using a mix of practical shots of a roller coaster in motion as well as in-studio shots for the deaths, it's uneven and a bit janky-looking. The second film over-delivered on the opening calamity, and this pales in comparison.
Following Wendy and others getting off the roller coaster before its epic fail, Wendy starts to see in the photos she was taking for school yearbook signs that the survivors are going to die. What happens often, though is Wendy and friends are looking at the wrong picture and thus the wrong signs.. the point being there's really no way to tell, no way to be certain what death's plan is for you.
While I like the vehicle for predicting the deaths much, much more than the repeated "visions" in FD2 (photos prognosticating deaths date back at least to The Omen), the deaths themselves are for the most part fairly straightforward, with no where near the level of fake-outs and surprises that the second film had, although there's a pretty decent sequence involving a drive-thru lineup, hills and a runaway delivery truck.
The finale of the film, taking place at a tricentennial fair, is pretty weak, all things considered, as the film seemed far more concerned with its three leads than anyone in the audience. There is a delightfully wicked 5-months-later coda, though, that seems so much more inspired than the rest of the film.
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