In Celebration of First Features: #4 - Dylan Kidd's "Roger Dodger"

The origin of this movie is legendary - writer/director Dylan Kidd, recently graduated from NYU, was in possession of a script he utterly believed in, but was failing at every turn to find the money from the usual sources to go into production. So while he worked a variety of odd jobs to stay alive, Kidd aggressively sought his leading man as the gateway to getting what he needed.

As the story goes (1) (2), Kidd traveled everywhere with his screenplay, prepared for any opportunity. When Campbell Scott sat at a neighboring table in some Greenwich Village cafe, Kidd seized the moment and pitched Scott the story of "Roger Dodger." Campbell took the screenplay to read, and not only called Kidd three weeks later, but also brought other name talents onto the project to flesh out the cast and facilitate that necessary green light.

The script was written to be filmed on a limited budget - a minimal set of protagonists, a limited number of locations, and a clear, concise through-line. Kidd shot "Roger Dodger" with an appropriately low-budget sensibility. The majority of the camerawork is handheld, allowing for quick setups and flexible blocking on location - when money is tight everyone needs to be nimble. The cinematography also appears to use only available light, which provides a bold, if at times murky look.



The framing of the action is often catastrophically tight - a characteristic of Neil LaBute's debut "In The Company of Men" - which, while mostly serving the story, gives the film an oppressively limited canvas and absence of environment. This, plus the swimming motion of the handheld camera gives the entire film a drunken, unfocused aspect that confounds rather than amplifies comprehension and atmosphere.

But the strength of "Roger Dodger" is most definitely the script. I saw this film when it was first released and I dimly recalled not liking the film, presumably being turned off by the lazy feeling faux verite cinematography that has since become quite the fashion (see: any episode of Ronald D Moore's "Battlestar Galactica", for example). What I missed, however, was how taut the script is - how the action keeps rolling along, how the dialog mostly sizzles, and how the motivations of the characters are all unique and well drawn. The script has a lot of genuine personality and focused energy, and yet at this second watching something is still missing for me.



At first I laid blame at the door of Campbell Scott, who feels miscast in the roll of Roger. He comes across as totally unlikeable - I can't imagine him getting within a million miles of any sentient woman, never mind Isabella Rosselini. But on reflection the lack rests with Dylan Kidd himself, who fails to embellish Scott's performance with the necessary nuance to make his character play as human. Not that Scott's performance is anything less than meticulous, but the end result feels slavishly one-dimensional.

Roger is angry when he should be charming, contemptuous when he should be playful and knowing... Scott's Roger is a bland intellectual brute instead of an artful seducer - a bastard instead of a rogue. And I feel now that this is a fault of interpretation rather than of the written word. At no point did I feel myself rooting for Roger, or indeed for any character in the film. And that's going to distance your audience, which is the last thing you want to do.



And I say all this in an attempt to address how this film was so critically well received, and yet so failed to find an audience at the box office. The movie-going public has proven time and again, in the years since "Roger Dodger" was released, that shakey camerawork or limited budgets don't necessarily turn off an audience - take a look at Darren Aronofsky's "The Wrestler" as an example of a film that could have been received the same way if not for Mickey Rourke's dazzling, warm-hearted star turn.

Intellectually the script for "Roger Dodger" is fantastic, and technically this film is quite an achievement given Dylan Kidd's first-time director status, not to mention the limited resources he had to work with - all things the critics responded to. No, I believe it is that lack of a spark of fun and seduction, that Han Solo ingredient, that turned off movie-goers. Above anything else a film needs to win the audience over, through splendor as in the case of "Avatar," or more reasonably by being evocative and heartfelt. In this case, I fear, Roger's cynicism permeates the movie in a way that no tacked-on, feel-good ending can rescue it from.