Underrated Movie of the Week: Roger Dodger

Watch the trailer for Campbell Scott’s Roger Dodger right here on Fancast.

Campbell Scott is unassailably cool. The guy is ten shades of smooth and a hundred yards of interesting every time he’s on screen. In Singles, Kyra Sedgwick tells him “You always say the perfect thing,” and that seems to be the case with this guy, which makes him perfect for this role. He plays Roger, a New York slickster with a penchant for rambling on eloquently, interestingly and verbosely about a variety of topics, capable of provoking and deferring on a whim, as evidenced by the opening conversation sequence. Whether you agree with the philosophy he’s spouting is irrelevant - everyone wants to be this engrossing whenever they speak, although no one wants to be as full of crap as Roger is.

We come to discover he’s one of the classic ‘overthinkers,’ who can see all the angles, knows all the deep-rooted issues that cause relationships to succeed or fail, yet cannot for the life of him carry one on successfully. Luckily, he’s fooled himself into thinking he doesn’t even want one, content to psychoanalyze unwitting subjects in bars and play high-priced office gigolo for his boss at the ad agency (Isabella Rossellini), all of whom are growing weary of his games. There’s the sense that Roger himself is getting tired of it, too, but when he gets dumped by his boss, there’s a tailspin coming on, and a rather significant one.

Then along comes his 17-year-old nephew Nick (Jesse Eisenberg), fresh out of Ohio and looking to score. He’s heard tales of Roger’s prowess with the womenfolk and has traveled to New York to get some tips on how to get rid of that pesky virginity he hasn’t been able to shed. This comes at an opportune time for Roger, as he now has someone with unwavering faith in his abilities to shore up his secretly broken confidence, and thus he takes on the project of creating a sexual being out of the awkward, goofy kid with gusto, not betraying for an instant that his “approach” isn’t necessarily as tried and true as he says it is. When the unlikely pair lure a Showgirl (Elizabeth Berkley) and a Flashdancer (Jennifer Beals) out for a strange night on the town, truths slowly start to come out.

Shot in a fly-on-the-wall documentarian style by director Dylan Kidd, it’s mainly an excuse for Campbell Scott to truly put on an acting clinic. Scott himself has said in the past that acting no longer really interests him. He knows all the beats too well. Essentially, he’s too good at it. While he’s done some directorial work, such as Off the Map, watching Roger Dodger is really watching a master at work. Look into it.