'Roger Dodger'
Verbal assault

'WORDS ARE MY stock in trade," brags Roger Swanson (Campbell Scott), a first-class lout who uses his gift of dizzying gab to become the top copywriter in his advertising firm, to habitually get his boss (Isabella Rossellini) into bed, and to woo every female who strays into his sight line. He's handy at utilizing his vocabulary as a sadistic hobby as well, proving capable of unleashing lacerating tongue-lashings and wicked barbs at a moment's provocation. But the cruelest joke of all is that this self-proclaimed ladies' man really doesn't know dick about the fairer sex; his one truly intimate relationship is with his own self-loathing. So when his precocious teenage nephew, Nick (Jesse Eisenberg), shows up looking for tips on the art of seduction, you can practically hear the backbone-snap of innocence lost coming like a far-off thunderclap. Words are also first-time director-writer Dylan Kidd's main ace in the hole, as he's constructed a film consisting of one riff of whirling verbiage after another with a self-conscious case of antsy Cassavetes-camera jitters (note to Kidd: using a tripod is not selling out). What lets Roger dodge the curse of seeming like table scraps from Mike Leigh's Naked are the performers, who are able to dish out grace notes by the dozen: the pictures of Rossellini shutting down the affair through a continuous cobra-smile, of the great Scott, world-weary and enveloped in cigarette smoke and bubbling-over bile, and of Jennifer Beals's lingered-over glance in a cab are worth a thousand of the more scripty rantings scattered throughout the proceedings. It's mainly their line readings of Kidd's hyperbolic prose that makes Roger Dodger worth a look, giving the budding filmmaker's love of nihilistic patter a life even in a third act of diminishing returns. (David Fear)