a review by Jeffrey Overstreet
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C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters is a brilliant and beloved satire, perhaps Lewis’s most consistently funny and inventive work. Lewis introduces us to Screwtape, a fiendish but engagingly eloquent demon who is instructing an apprentice demon – Wormwood – in the ways of diverting human beings from virtue and holiness. He lays out a blueprint for ensnaring men and women in traps of temptation. You can learn a lot about wickedness from Screwtape, but ultimately you can sense the emptiness in him, the loneliness, the fear, and the incompleteness in his perspective.
Writer/director Dylan Kidd has turned in a cinematic Screwtape this year. His name is Roger, and he’s a womanizer, a lurking terrorist of the Manhattan singles’ scene. His technique is effective; he makes women feel terrible about themselves, makes them believe they are incomplete without him.
As the film opens, Roger is being dumped. This is incomprehensible to him, bu he is at a disadvantage because the woman dumping him (Isabella Rosselini) is his boss. Bewilderment turns to steely rage, and you can sense him sharpening his intellectual knives to find ways of striking back. “I’m your boy!” he insists, failing to realize how true that is. Roger may be a giant of manipulation, but emotionally is still a child.
In the nick of time, Roger’s ego is saved by the arrival of his nephew, who is on the run from trouble back home. Nick is a naive 16-year-old, a bundle of bursting hormones and insecurities. He’s eager to learn first-hand what he has been hearing about in conversations at school – he wants to learn about women and how to get laid. Roger enthusiastically take Nick out on the town for a tour of the various circles of night-life hell in the heart of Manhattan, in the bars, clubs, parties, and worse. Here, the lonely and reckless waste their bodies and their emotions on irresponsible people like themselves. Before Nick can gather his wits, he’s sitting at a table studying Roger’s every move while two beautiful women join them.
Roger is a salesman, not just in the office but in all things. He laughs at women’s jokes to make them feel good, but if another man makes a humorous remark, he responds with a cold, hard, condescending stare. He is a vicious competitor, philosophizing about evolution and doing all he can to ignore and belittle ideas of love and connection between people. If he senses weakness, be it sexual insecurity, loneliness, or a liking for too much drink, he will exploit it to get what he wants… to get a woman to be enthralled and intoxicated by him even if … and this is his power … even if they are repulsed by him.
These episodes of the script could easily have been played for shock value, impressing us with how low Roger can go. And he certainly sinks low. But Kidd is more mature than that. He uses each exchange to peel away the illusion of Roger’s confidence, showingus how sad and empty he is. Regarding Nick, Kidd could easily have made this a movie about a 16 year-old’s coming-of-age, and that is certainly portrayed with realism and heart. Jesse Eisenberg is affecting as poor naive Nick, eager to “score” but still possessed of an innocence and a semi-healthy conscience. Nick charges ahead, following his uncle’s instructions, and actually seems like he might succeed in seducing one or both of these older ladies. But his conscience is not yet dead, and while it is precisely his innocence that attracts the women, that same innocence prevents him from what Roger calls “closing the deal.”
The regrettable flaw in Kidd’s vision is that while he recognizes the empitiness of nightclub flings, he have a strong enough sense of what makes a healthy relationship. The film’s object lessons only go so far as to suggest Nick should show kindness to the girls in his class and then sexual intercourse will be a perfectly good idea. Nick will need to learn that sexual relations are not a good idea between a man and a woman unless they have made a lifelong commitment to each other. Anything else is disrespect, devaluing the other’s most intimate gifts.
While the film doesn’t go far enough for me in its love lessons, it does show considerable concern for Roger’s soul. His tutelage of Nick could be his last, biggest mistake, or it could wake him up to his own malevolence, his own loss of virtue.
The underrated Campbell Scott (son of George C. Scott) turns in his finest performance here. His pinpoint pupils are used to chilling effect, his chiseled movie star features convincing us that he just might be right in considering himself “the Michael Jordan of scoring.” Scott’s feverish portrayal of a man relentless in his lustful pursuits is a dead-on exposé of a male perspective cultivated by the media, by the sexism of sports and Sports Illustrated, by so much of American pop culture. It may be that Eisenberg’s performance is even more impressive, in that he goes to-to-toe with Scott in every scene they have together. It’s a surprisingly humble and generous performance; he give Nick vulnerability, moments of stumbling awkwardness, and moments of courage and wit.
Many conservative critics will condemn this film for “filthy content.” That’s like condemning a hospital for being a place of disease. Kidd deals with “filth” the way a surgeon is interested in a tumor. By exposing it to the light and revealing the damage that it does, he allows us to separate it from healthier “material” and come away wiser for it.
Kidd is to be applauded for his restraint. He easily could have used this morality tale as an excuse to fill the screen with nudity, sexual exploits, and gratuitously graphic storytelling. Instead, he manages to create a realistically sordid late-night environment without shoving our faces into lurid imagery. He makes his points and moves along, keeping the story rolling, keeping his focus on the moral question. And he succeeds, somehow, in making us feel something for this gutter-minded, lust monster named Roger. It is also fortunate that he is restrained enough to avoid any sweeping moral transformations. We are left with hope for both Roger and Nick. They are beginning to learn from their mistakes. Fortunately for Roger, he may yet be human, capable of choosing contrary to his baser appetites, whereas Screwtape is a demon, striding headlong into eternal misery.