Fight Clip Club: Rob Roy

or, yet one more reason to adore Tim Roth.

Journey with me, into the mid-1990s, where a lovely and lush piece of historical fiction gets an incredibly stellar cast to don breeches and long curly wigs, to tell an old Scottish story in a somewhat overdramatized way. None other than Liam Neeson as our protagonist? Jessica Lange as his wife? John Hurt? I’m so in. But wait …who is that, playing the nasty villain who’s so sinister that he actually slithers? Why, it’s a young, lithe, and evilly brilliant Tim Roth!

And now, Join Me for the Tim Roth Appreciation Hour

One of my very favorite movies has to be Reservoir Dogs. Sure, it’s a bit violent (it is Quentin Tarantino, after all), but it’s violence that’s absolutely in line with the needs of the very tight plot. It boasts one of those oddly non-chronological storylines Tarantino is so fond of, and the acting is completely stellar, across the board. It’s a twisty and tense heist flick, with all the witty dialogue we’ve come to know and love from Tarantino projects, and Roth plays the central character, ensemble cast though this arguably is. This was the first movie that popularized Tarantino, for good reason I think, and one of the best things about this best movie is the indomitable Tim Roth. He plays a double agent so beautifully, his physical as well as psychological work so meticulous and astonishing, and you can see why Tarantino brought Roth back for a role in Pulp Fiction which, even though a small role, he sparkled in). Oh come on: Reservoir Dogs came out in 1992, I can’t possibly be spoiling it for you, can I? (Hm, maybe I should do one of those scenes of violence here in a future FCC? What do you think?)

Of course, if you know me at all or if you’ve been following my Instagram/fb, you’ll know that I’m a Shakespeare nut. I love the Bard’s wittiest and weirdest plays best, but one of my favorite Shakespeare plays isn’t written by him (shaddap, Oxfordians; I’m not talking to you), but a postmodernist masterpiece written by Tom Stoppard, called Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead. A young Tim Roth and Gary Oldman play the titular characters in the 1990 movie version (with an incandescent Richard Dreyfuss, as well—go watch it now if you like your brain tickled). Roth does an amazing job with this frothy, surreal intellectualism while keeping a depth and sincerity to his performance that just gobsmacks me. Here’s just one of many examples of what I mean.

But my absolute favorite place to watch Tim Roth shine isn’t a movie at all but a TV show. Called Lie to Me, it aired from 2009-2011, and was a sort of Sherlock-adjacent premise surrounding an in investigative firm filled with psychologists, including Roth as its central eccentric, a micro-expression expert and a complicated man. The science of this superfun procedural was based on Paul Ekman’s work irl, and… gosh I’m just now seeing a trend here, in my Tim Roth fanaticism, eh? It all seems to be cerebrally or intellectually based stuff, huh? Interesting. 

The other thing Roth does in all these of my favorite works of his (kind of similar to Ben Kigsley but less terrifying), is his ability to simmer. He’s able to barely contain an intensity just below the surface, that makes him mesmerizing to watch. This underlying intensity works well in Rob Roy, though Roth’s villain is less deep scintillation, more surface slime, and I love to see it. Plus, he cuts the 18th century fashion jib quite well.

What’s your favorite Tim Roth venture? Is it Rob Roy?