"You drink that drink!"

"I say a lot of things," Campbell Scott's Roger Swanson tells his nephew Nick (Jesse Eisenberg) towards the end of writer-director Dylan Kidd's 2002 indie film Roger Dodger. And that's one of the few honest sentences we get out of him throughout the 106-minute film. Roger is an expert copy writer for commercials; an ad man who wears suits, drinks, smokes and most of all, talks. Hey, look at that. I guess it should win an Emmy three years in a row for its originality. But I digress. My bitterness towards AMC's most overrated show aside, our introduction to Roger in the first scene illustrates all these traits perfectly. He is delivering a rapid-fire speech about the growing uselessness of the male species in an age where scientists are working on fertilizing an egg without the need for sperm. Pretty soon, he espouses, men will be nothing more than tools used to move couches. His colleagues around the table, male and female alike, are left speechless, in awe of his masterful use of the language and his ability to twist any logic to support his argument. Among these colleagues is Roger's boss Joyce (the incandescent Isabella Rossellini, in an inspired casting choice). She challenges Roger on a few occasions, but ultimately lets him have his moment of glory. At the end of this 15-minute long opening sequence, Roger comes off looking confident and victorious, a guy who seems to be on top of his game in every respect.

Very quickly, however, we discover how untrue this first impression really is. Roger's life is in shambles. While professionally, he is said to be the best and funniest writer on staff, his personal life is pathetic at best. He is having an affair with Joyce, which is clearly emasculating for him, as she not only has seniority in age and rank, but she holds all the cards in their relationship. She calls him whenever she wants his company; the deed is always done at her apartment; and she breaks it off with him shortly after the aforementioned opening sequence, leaving him no room to argue or try to reconcile. We see Roger trolling the New York City bars at night, starting conversations with women he does not know, psychoanalyzing them, their childhood and their sexual habits and getting nowhere except kicked out of said bars. He is a mess. And he could not be less appealing as a protagonist.

Enter Nick, arriving at Roger's office unannounced from Ohio. He says he is in New York for an interview with Columbia University, which he is only going through with to please his mother. He is a computer whiz who wants to design software and games when he graduates high school (I know, I know. The foreshadowing is crazy talk amazing. I died. There's even a nightclub scene later on. But alas, there is no JT and no Dennis de Laat and no one proclaiming "THIS IS OUR TIME!" However, as I type this, A Few Good Men is on TBS, or Peachtree or whatever the hell it's called this week, so both Sorkin and Eisenberg are one and two degrees away from Kevin Bacon, respectively. Take that for a non sequitur!) Nick is not exactly a ladies' man, to put it mildly, and he has been told by his mother, as a non-compliment, that Roger is. Nick wants Roger to take him out on the town and help him in that department. Throughout the course of that night, we follow Roger and Nick on their journey into the unknown (for Nick) and known-far-too-well (for Roger).

The first step entails Roger dispelling his 'wisdom' about women systematically as he takes Nick through the streets of New York and shows him, basically, how to be a complete creep. How to best position oneself to catch a glimpse up a woman's skirt or down her blouse. How to stand in just the right spot in relation to the light so as to see through women's clothes. How to pretend to check one's watch or drop one's pen to get that all-important money shot.

What's interesting about this sequence is the almost guerrilla-style of filmmaking that is used by the director to capture it. Unlike most films, Kidd chose to shoot on a very busy Manhattan street, during evening rush hour, without stopping any traffic, pedestrian or otherwise. He simply sent Scott and Eisenberg out on the street, hooked up with radio microphones, and shot them at a distance, often from behind various signs, buildings and other random street objects, not to mention passing pedestrians and cars. On the commentary track, Scott mentions that he hasn't seen this style of filmmaking since the 1970s, in films like Midnight Cowboy.It's an incredibly bold and daring decision by Kidd, and it pays off in a big way in enticing the audience enough to want to look around and past the obstacles throughout the film and see what will happen to the two characters.

Roger then sneaks Nick into an upscale lounge, where he tries to fine-tune Nick's conversational skills by telling him never to open up to a woman, even though the first urge he might get is to reveal personal details about himself. Instead, it is all about making up elaborate lies to make oneself seem more appealing, Roger declares, such as the line, "I'm an actor, researching a role," in case Nick's underage status comes into question, which Nick actually uses several times later on in the film, although never to a woman.

 

The title of this review comes from one of the best-delivered lines in the film, uttered by Roger to Nick in incredulity at his resistance to alcohol. Roger also ridicules Nick's silver "Medic Alert-type" bracelet with instructions on how to cryogenically freeze his body if he dies prematurely, though he softens the blow by saying, "That's just spastic enough to be charming." What we get throughout this scene and the whole film is that, even though Nick has come all this way to learn the ropes from his experienced uncle and he wants nothing more than to lose his virginity that night, he cannot help but stay true to his genuine and pure nature and, hard as Roger tries, he cannot change him for the worse.

Through his ever-shameful tactics, Roger manages to get two thirty-something women to sit at their table and Nick convinces them to stay by formulating his first lie: that he and his uncle have a $1000 bet that he can make someone fall in love with him that night. Andrea and Sophie (played with surprising charm and effectiveness by Elizabeth Berkley and Jennifer Beals, respectively) find Nick charming and adorable and stick around, despite their obvious repulsion towards Roger and his cherished tactics. Roger commandeers the conversation with his usual acidic tongue and is met with eye rolls, while Nick mainly stays quiet and observes the women. When Nick finally starts talking, however, he blows the women away with his honest and romantic notions about relationships. He talks about how he resents the 'moves' or mannerisms that men are programmed to find attractive and women are programmed to display. He yearns for what's genuine and authentic about a person, what lies beneath those mannerisms, what is going to make a couple stay together after the moves have grown old and ineffective. Roger is horrified, but Andrea and Sophie, already fed up with their experiences with men in the dating world, find this refreshing and want to hear more.

Breaking another one of Roger's cardinal rules, Nick goes into family history, explaining the 'Roger Dodger' nickname his mom used when she and her brother were younger because Roger could talk himself out of anything and never got into trouble, even when he got caught. Nick also says that he wants to be like his granddad, who never talked, but when he did, everyone "leaned forward," something we've already seen Nick do with increasing aptitude at that very table. He reveals his mother's secret "high-functioning" alcoholism: "like father, like daughter," which is a surprise not only for the ladies, but for Roger, as well. He later chastises him for all this transference of information, telling him that, "for most of us, this is a 'forgetting' place" (air quotes - always good). Roger tells Nick that he has to be able to "read his partner" as in a game of bridge and not talk about his family if he has any hopes of salvaging the evening.

After getting kicked out of the bar for being underage, the four go to a park, where Nick gets to ask Andrea and Sophie any question he wants. He decides that he wants to know about their first time, which is met by enthusiasm from them and abhorrence from Roger. After revealing that he is a virgin and he's never had a real kiss, Nick gets his first real kiss from Sophie, while Roger is still completely repulsive to them both and drives them away, then sends Nick after them, revealing his "Good Cop, Bad Cop" method. Nick runs after them, but cannot get them to stay. Sophie does, however, give him a memento to remember her by and tells him, "we need more men like you," causing Nick to ponder, as he does many times that night, why he is asking Roger for help when he seems more clueless than Nick about how to find a meaningful relationship. Has the manatee become the mento? Not quite.

Nick is still adamant about not leaving New York until he has achieved what he set out to do. After a couple of low points involving a stop at Joyce's apartment for a party that Roger was not invited to, where he encourages Nick to take advantage of an extremely drunk, practically unconscious coworker (Nick wisely puts her to bed instead of going any further), creates a scene and leaves, and the final "Fail Safe" plan involving an underground brothel that tests even Roger's questionable morals and has him dragging Nick out at the eleventh hour to save his first experience for a less loathsome occasion, the two go home, defeated and not speaking. Nick returns to Ohio, apologizing half-heartedly to Roger about getting angry with him. We see that Roger appears to be a changed man. He is regretful about the events of the previous night, and when confronted with one of his own lies about getting laid every night by Nick, he speaks the words that began this review.

We don't spend enough time with Roger after this supposed transformation to see if it will last, but he does visit Nick and his mom in Ohio, where he goes to Nick's school and gives advice to his equally unlucky in love friends, revealing a new side of himself by telling them to be honest with the girl they are interested in. After he leaves, Nick has his long-awaited opportunity with the girl he has had his eye on, Angela, courtesy of Roger, and the film ends before we hear what line he uses.

Whew. Now you really don't need to see the movie. I've explained every single thing that happens in it. It's been a long time since I've written a proper review and clearly the eraser has been left off of my pencil. But here is why you do need to see it. First of all, why haven't you seen it already? I say this, one: because I am intolerant of almost everyone; and two: because I myself usually save reading reviews until I've seen the film in question and have formulated my own opinion of it. Unless it's a film I'm on the fence about (such as Clint Eastwood's upcoming Hereafter, which got everyone in a tizzy at TIFF, for reasons beyond my comprehension, but which at last check has only a 60% by top critics, meriting a "meh" and a "No, thank you. Fincher has it in the bag this year").

This is definitely an easy film to miss. I don't think I had heard of it before I began meticulously combing through Jesse Eisenberg's filmography on IMDb to see everything he'd ever done. It did well with critics and on the film festival circuit, but it made less than $2000 at the US box office, so it's safe to say that almost everyone missed it. However, it's definitely worth digging up the DVD. It's Eisenberg's first feature film, and he is intensely watchable as always. The script is a great one, allowing him and the impeccable Campbell Scott (of the elusive last name-first name and first name-last name variety) to chew on the words and convey them with relish. And mustard.

Scott is definitely a familiar face. One of those faces you've seen in a million things but can't name a single one (yes, redundancy. I enjoy it). But an interesting factoid I have just discovered this instant is that his father is George C. Scott. As in General 'Buck' Turgidson in Dr. Strangelove? As in Patton? HALLO?! That is cred. But even if he is not a familiar face and even if you could care less about his father (kindly see yourself out), his performance alone is worth a watch. As are his silver panther eyes, which John Francis Donaghy would only appreciate oh, so much. Aside from that, not enough can be said about the amount of joy I extract from watching Jesse Eisenberg's dancing eyebrows onscreen. In the final nanoseconds of the film alone, as we are waiting with bated breath to hear his response to Angela, he does more with his face than that cretin he is always being compared to has shown his entire life. Jesse Eisenberg is a rich man's Jesse Eisenberg. While you let the full effect of that sentence reverberate within your being, seek out Roger Dodger and give it a watch. And then watch Damages for more Campbell Scott, as I intend to do. We'll recap in the morning.