Roger Dodger (105 mins, 15) Directed by Dylan Kidd; starring Campbell Scott, Jesse Eisenberg, Isabella Rossellini, Elizabeth Berkley, Jennifer Beals
From Mozart's patrician Don Giovanni to Bill Naughton's working-class Alfie, the silver-tongued womaniser is a character we first admire for his boldness and sexual success before taking pleasure in seeing him get his comeuppance in the form of rejection, impotence, loneliness, domestic subjugation or the fires of hell.
The latest incarnation of this figure is Roger Swanson (Campbell Scott), the eponymous anti-hero of Roger Dodger, a highly promising, low-budget feature debut by the young New York writer-director, Dylan Kidd.
Roger is a successful Manhattan advertising copywriter in his late thirties, unmarried, living alone, a frequenter of smart bars, charming in a slightly sleazy manner, confident in a somewhat overbearing way. He has undisguised contempt for the gullible public his advertisements exploit and views everyone else with a slightly concealed disdain.
To keep the world under control, he has devised a cynical scenario that fits everyone into a variety of predictable roles and situations. He's a man of words rather than deeds and, appropriately, Kidd presents him through a series of dialogues that have echoes of David Mamet's Sexual Perversity in Chicago and Neil LaBute's story of suave pick-up artists from the business world, In the Company of Men.
We first see Roger holding forth in a bar to some friends about the coming servitude of men in a future dominated by woman. He's manipulative, self-certain, talking to win and always wreathed in cigarette smoke like Mount Etna in an angry mood.
But there is a succession of hints that all is not well, that he's not as irresistible as he thinks. He gets angry after an attractive girl appears to be taking his bait and then cuts herself free. In a hilarious scene, he comes on insultingly strong to a woman sitting beside him at a bar and gets ejected into the street. His immediate boss (Isabella Rossellini) ends her unwise affair with him, eliciting from Roger the line: 'Goodbye sex is never good; next week, we'll have to have get-together-again sex.'
These establishing scenes are a prelude to the picture's dramatic core which takes place over a single evening and night, starting with the unexpected arrival of his 16-year-old nephew, Nick (Jesse Eisenberg), who claims to be in Manhattan from Ohio for an interview at Columbia University. The callow, slightly built, casually dressed Nick is the classic country mouse in search of a sentimental education and a lesson on sexual savvy from the sophisticated town mouse, his uncle.
In an initially light and witty manner, Roger takes Nick for an instructive evening out, showing him the art of picking up girls from the first contact to getting them into bed, a shorter, nastier version of what Stephen Potter called 'Woomanship'. He assures Nick that he must retain to the very end the quality that, according to Magic Johnson, sets Michael Jordan aside - 'winning time'.
But it's the naif nephew who steadily, if unconsciously, undermines Roger during a long session sitting in a bar and on park benches with a couple of attractive single women (Elizabeth Berkley, Jennifer Beals) Roger picks up. We learn that Roger comes from a dysfunctional middle-American family. Rejected by his father, unloved by his mother, on bad terms with a sister eight years his senior, he's grown up regarding his birth as an accident. His nickname 'Roger Dodger' came from an ability to talk himself out of trouble. His misanthropy and misogyny began at home.
To Roger's fury, it is the innocent, virginal Nick who appeals to the two girls and as he loses control and gets more and more drunk, a lighthearted night on the town in the manner of Neil Simon turns into a brutal journey to the end of the night. Carefully lit by the cinematographer Joaquín Baca-Asay, the movie gets progressively darker.
The film comes to resemble an anteroom of hell and when, eventually, Roger takes Nick to a horrendous subterranean brothel, a trapdoor opens before them in an alleyway like the entrance to hell from which the demons seize Mozart's Don Giovanni.
The movie isn't without its flaws - the office scenes lack conviction and there's a glib, unnecessary coda that attempts to sugar an astringent pill. But the acting is not to be faulted. Isabella Rossellini is coldly imperious as the agency boss; she could play several of the less lovable women in a film of Toby Young's How to Lose Friends and Alienate People.
Elizabeth Berkley and Jennifer Beals bring a touching warmth and vulnerability to a pair of characters who, at first, seem hard and slightly tarty. Jesse Eisenberg is convincingly gauche as Nick, who's like a high-school kid from American Pie having stumbled into a nineteenth-century French novel.
The major performance, of course, holding the whole thing together, is that of Campbell Scott, one of the most versatile young actors in America today. He manages superbly Roger's controlled desperation and unacknowledged self-hatred. His oppressive chain-smoking is simultaneously part of his technique and a revelation of his inner state. Like his father, the great George C. Scott, he has tremendous presence and never solicits the audience's sympathy.