Also this issue: Frida, Be Me Frida is more about its director and secondary characters than its ostensible subject. -Cindy Fuchs Hotsy 'Qatsi Closing out the Koyaanisqatsi trilogy. -Sam Adams new continuing Showtimes repertory film Screen Picks -Sam Adams

October 31-November 6, 2002

movies

The Player

GREAT SCOTT: Campbell Scott puts his charm to use for a change.

Campbell Scott is a smooth-talking smoothie, but is he happy?

by Sam Adams

Roger Dodger opens with a bravura sequence, the kind that either elevates or sinks an entire film. Drunk less on alcohol than on his own glibness, Roger (Campbell Scott), a mid-level ad exec who’s enjoying a boozy lunch with several colleagues, launches into a spellbinding explanation of how men are about to become “extinct.” They’ve had their traditional roles usurped, lost their primacy in the workplace and the home -- all that’s left is for women to figure out how to reproduce without sperm and men will be nothing more than a source of cheap labor. It’s hogwash, the worst kind of antifeminist drivel, but Scott puts it across with the conviction of Ryan Gosling in The Believer or David Thewlis in Naked, and you get off on his rhetorical flourishes and his contagious adrenaline: You’re enjoying watching Roger be Roger.

That's pretty much what Dylan Kidd's debut feature is about. There's no particular insight into relations between the sexes; though that opening conversation cannily echoes the beginning of Reservoir Dogs, Kidd doesn't have the heart for real provocation. And the plot's just enough to serve: Roger is abruptly saddled with his teenage nephew Nick (Jesse Eisenberg), who's decided it's time for Uncle Roger to teach him the finer points of wooing the fairer sex. Roger jumps at the chance, boasting that he scores "every night," and sneaks Nick into a swanky bar, where they do their best to pick up Elizabeth Berkeley and Jennifer Beals. But as is usually the case in a movie set in the span of a day, Roger is near his breaking point. For all his bravado, he's vulnerable, both personally and at work -- which amounts to the same thing, since he's been having an affair with his boss (Isabella Rossellini), and she's just dumped him. The whole time Roger is playing smooth and telling his nephew the sure-fire way to get over, we know he's only a hair's-breadth away from being drunk enough to go over to her apartment and try to knock down the door.

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Like a lot of mid-scale indies, Roger Dodger is essentially a one-character movie, but there are worse actors to focus your attention on than Campbell Scott. He's played white-bread repressives for so long that it's a relief to see him use his considerable charisma for once, rather than battle against it. Scott usually plays men who think they're less attractive than they are, but his '40s matinee idol looks are amply employed here to suggest a person who's focused all his attention on his outward appearance (the bait, if you will) without much confronting who he is. Scott lets us appreciate Roger's well-honed patter without insisting we believe it -- chances are, he doesn't either. Without being as forced as the faux-screwball antics of The Imposters, Roger Dodger lets Scott draw on the same skills, which makes it all the sadder that they don't work nowadays.