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Roger Dodger
***
Capsule-length
Cinema Review - September 6, 2003
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 15. USA.
104 minutes. Written and directed by Dylan Kidd. Produced by Anne Chaison,
Dylan Kidd, George VanBuskirk. Starring Campbell Scott, Jesse Eisenberg,
Isabella Rossellini, Elizabeth Berkley, Jennifer Beals, Mina Badie, Ben Shenkman,
Chris Stack.
There's a lot of sharp, smart conversation and
offhand psychology going on here. Campbell Scott is Roger, a charming writer
of ad copy in New York, and Jesse Eisenberg plays Nick, his 16-year old nephew
on a big city visit. The boy is a well-meaning geeky sort who wants advice
on how to get girls. Roger knows how to talk -- he gives advice that would
sound like the confidence-building tips you find in men's magazines, if he
didn't insist on giving it such a cynical twist.
When asked about his job, he says, "I sit here
trying to think up ways of making people feel bad. It's a substitution game.
You need to remind people that something is missing from their lives. Instead
of working to root out the real reason for their misery, they go out and
buy a stupid looking pair of cargo pants." He and Nick go around the streets,
chatting up a lot of girls, with the boy really interested in them as people,
and Roger keeping everything witty and slick. The real subject of the movie,
never spoken out loud, is how lonely Roger is, and how he wastes his obvious
frankness and intelligence on over-analysing things until he finds reasons
to hate them.
The writer-director is Dylan Kidd, a young guy
making his debut feature, who got the financing after running into Scott
in a café and handing him the script. His dialogue addresses our
expectations, gets us laughing and stops the movie from becoming too obvious
a character study. His camera is jerky, handheld, sort of voyeuristic, and
as the pair of guys amble through town, we feel like we're hanging out with
them. The surface is all very entertaining, the subtext touching. Only the
last scene really goes wrong, ending things on the note of some kind of fluffy
comedy.
COPYRIGHT©
2003 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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