"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).
