BURDEN OF ROOF

Opening this weekend:

Roofman--The story of Jeff Manchester, known as "Roofman," sounds like a tall tale. After serving in the U.S. Army, the California native robbed dozens of McDonalds restaurants, among other businesses, usually by cutting through the roof before opening time, politely and apologetically sticking up the arriving employees at gunpoint, locking them in the freezer, and looting the registers.

He was caught in North Carolina in 2000 and sentenced to 45 years in prison--his gentleman bandit routine cut no ice with the judge--but escaped in 2004. He then hid out inside a Toys "R" Us in Charlotte, subsisting on Peanut M&Ms and baby food, for around half a year.

But even that isn't the most astounding part of the story. During his Toys "R" Us residency Manchester, calling himself "John Zorn," slipped out into the community. He started attending a Presbyterian Church, dating a local single mother with two daughters, and generally acting like he was putting down roots.

The title role in this new film about Manchester's exploits seems tailor made for Channing Tatum. At one point in this film a cop remarks that Manchester is extremely smart, probably genius level, but "also an idiot." Few contemporary stars seem better equipped to get across that combination of resourceful ingenuity with extravagantly imbecilic recklessness, or of sweet, guileless, well-intentioned decency with dangerous obtuseness.

Most of Tatum's costars seem shrewdly cast to come across as sharp and intelligent by contrast to Manchester: Kirsten Dunst as Leigh, the Toys "R" Us employee to whom he takes a shine; Peter Dinklage as Mitch, the store's snide, toxic manager; LaKeith Stanfield as Manchester's shady old army buddy and Lily Collias as Leigh's elder daughter all seem, if they don't always act, dauntingly smart and perceptive. The faithful, led by Ben Mendelsohn as the pastor and Uzo Aduba as his wife, amusingly show us the seductive aggression with which a new face in church, especially a young single man, may be greeted. 

Directed by Derek Cianfrance from a script he wrote with Kirt Gunn, the movie unfolds in an America in which many of us live--fast food restaurants and chain stores and apartment buildings--but which we only occasionally see convincingly depicted. It's skillfully crafted, but it depends for its light tone on us finding Roofman lovable. Because no irrevocable tragedy resulted from Manchester's crimes, but perhaps even more importantly because he's played by Channing Tatum, we can.

HORNIER THAN THOU

Playing this week at Filmbar Phoenix:

Horns—Taken for granted as guilty in the murder of his adored girlfriend, young Ig Perrish wakes up one morning to find a pair of the title appendages growing out of his forehead. They have, in addition to a rather elegant, backward-curving look, a startling effect on the people Ig encounters around the Pacific Northwest lumber town where he lives, and is seen as a pariah—without invitation, they disclose to him their baser inner thoughts.

This is the set-up for this film version of the 2010 novel by Joe Hill (the son, as he is probably sick of reviewers pointing out, of Stephen King), directed by Alexandre Aja from a script by Keith Bunin. Ig (Daniel Radcliffe) decides to use his newfound ability to elicit candor to figure out who really killed his beloved. The killer isn’t that difficult to guess—I know this because I correctly guessed who it was—but there are nonetheless intriguing layers to the mystery, and the central premise, Ig’s plight and his response to it, is fascinating and amusingly handled.

The climax is a disappointingly standard gory grapple, and though he’s sympathetic as usual, Radcliffe’s performance here doesn’t get very far past haunted earnestness. But the film is still witty and well worth seeing.

RIP to the brilliant Mike Nichols, passed on suddenly this week at 83. Nichols is remembered for his early-‘60s sketch-comedy partnership with Elaine May, but he amassed a really diverse and lively collection of credits as a movie director, starting spectacularly with Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate and Catch-22 and Carnal Knowledge, through ‘80s notables like Silkwood and Working Girl, through enjoyable later works like Primary Colors and The Birdcage and his underrated swansong Charlie Wilson’s War. For all his bright, snappy wit, he tended to serve the material rather than impose his personality on it, and while not all of his movies were great or even good, a bunch of them will endure.

HORN STAR

You might forget the somniferous title character of Disney’s 1959 favorite Sleeping Beauty, you might forget her friendly fairy allies, you certainly might forget her crooning Prince. But few people who have seen that film are likely to have forgotten its horned sorceress Maleficent. This imperious, black-clad menace has long been rated among the all-time great screen villains.

Now, in a gesture that will likely cause traditionalists to bemoan the moral relativism of contemporary pop culture, she gets her own movie. Maleficent, starring Angelina Jolie in the title role, is both a backstory and a whitewash. It offers a coherent case for the spite which led her to curse the infant Princess Aurora, and it details her exculpatory relations with the adolescent Princess (Elle Fanning).

The script, by Linda Woolverton of Beauty and the Beast, takes most of the story’s actual wrongdoing off of Mallie’s shoulders and places it where it must, of course, ultimately belong—on a man. The trouble all starts because of the rat-fink behavior of Aurora’s dad Stefan (Sharlto Copley), who was Maleficent’s first love when she was a happy young fairy princess, spreading her wings. Circumstances later bring her into contact with Aurora, and lead her to repent her curse, but she finds she’s unable to revoke it. It’s one of the terrors that a fairy tale can dramatize better than almost any other form—that a momentary moral lapse may be impossible to come back from.

From its idyllic early scenes to its final battles, Maleficent has no shortage of Disney-style kitsch, banality and playing-it-safe platitudes. But the movie entertains anyway, and that’s almost entirely to Jolie’s credit. In an era when few screen actors, even talented ones, can lay claim to the title with confidence, she’s a true movie star. But it’s easy to forget that she’s also a real actress. She’s so inhumanly beautiful that it may be hard for her to find roles that fit her—wings and horns seem almost more plausible on her, somehow, than contemporary street clothes—but she was born to play this part, and it allows her to show off her way with a line, and her riveting poise.

There are other capable performances in the film. Copley, the striking fellow from the brilliant District 9, is striking again as the rotting-from-the-inside King, and Fanning’s Princess, who mistakes Maleficent for her Fairy Godmother, is amusing, mostly because her guileless glee is bounced off of Jolie’s dry reactions. If the kindly fairies—Juno Temple, Lesley Manville and the great Imelda Staunton—make less of an impression here, it may be because they get less interaction with the star. Almost certainly the best of Jolie’s foils is Sam Riley as Diaval, her shape-shifting servant and spy, who’s not afraid to give her backchat.

These filmmakers are to be commended for eschewing the standard, absolutist good-or-evil template usual to the Disney movies. It has to be said, though, that by turning Maleficent into a heroine, they’ve left a vacuum where the villainy should be that Copley’s King just doesn’t fill—he’s a despicable character, but not a strong one. The result is that the final clashes, though they carry plenty of high-fantasy spectacle and a lovely plot twist, aren’t deeply exciting.

There’s always been a certain ruthlessness to the way the classic Disney films engaged the base emotions of children—often through the death, or apparent death, of a beloved character, or by working up hatred toward a witch or other (often female) villain. Maleficent, like last year’s smash Frozen, is shaped as a fantasy for postmodern women and girls, and it wants to have it both ways—to enjoy the droll glamour and power of the sinister, but to take any deep evil out of it. The movie is rescued by the performance at its center, but ironically, in this tribute to the ultimate bad girl Jolie is finally forced to play a little too nice.

JUST SAY JOE

What happens when the hit man you hire to murder your mother falls in love with your younger sister? That’s the major dramatic question of William Friedkin’s new film Killer Joe, opening in the Valley this weekend at Harkins Camelview. The answer isn’t pretty.

Chris (Emile Hirsch), a small-potatoes Texas drug dealer, lives with his mother. His slow-thinking father Ansel (Thomas Haden Church) lives in a trailer park with his slatternly waitress wife Sharla (Gina Gershon) and Chris’ angelically pretty, otherworldly younger sister Dottie (Juno Temple). As the story begins, Chris, dangerously overdue to a loan shark, gets Ansel to agree to arranging the death of Chris and Dottie’s mother, to collect a life insurance policy. The idea is that, with Dottie as beneficiary, Ansel, Sharla, Chris and Dottie will be able to split it four ways—once they’ve paid the killer.

Said killer is Joe Cooper, a cop who commits the occasional homicide as a side business. Joe (Matthew McConaughey) almost calls off the deal when he learns that his prospective clients don’t have the money up front, but he’s gotten a good look at, and had a nice chat with, young Dottie, and he agrees to take the job if Ansel and Chris agree to “give” him Dottie “as a retainer.” Ansel and Chris agree to this outrage, and from there things all go downhill, with noir-style twists and turns culminating in a grueling—if also somewhat campy—scene of Grand Guignol humiliation that may change your relationship with fried chicken forever.

Killer Joe is based on an early play by Tracey Letts, the 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winner for August: Osage County, and while Friedkin gooses the action around to different locations with some good jagged transitions, the basic theatricality of the material is unmistakable. There’s really nothing essential in this dialogue-driven piece that couldn’t have been managed well enough on one set, and seeing it performed live would have had an even more shocking impact.

It’s plenty shocking on film, though. Rated NC-17, Killer Joe isn’t for everybody. It’s an excellent showcase of ensemble acting, however, from Church’s hilariously pre-defeated line readings to Gershon’s lewd smirks to Temple’s sweet, guileless amorality. Hirsch’s role is tough; constantly in terror and/or rage and haunted by both pure and Freudian devotion to Dottie, he gets less of a chance to play for laughs than the others, but he’s still effective.

The star role, unquestionably, is McConaughey’s terrifying yet compelling Joe. Soft-spoken and polite, even gallant, with a clear, observant stare, Joe’s a lethal psychopath and a helpless fetishist, yet something about his formal manner makes him seem less chaotic and ruinous than Chris and Ansel, and it’s clear enough why Dottie’s disassociative innocence would appeal to him.

The attitude that Killer Joe dramatizes is one of the basic positions of noir: that Women Are Trouble. While the film doesn’t try to debunk this view, it also suggests that men are so stupid, crooked, brutal and perverted that they deserve that trouble.