One function of film festivals is to provide a home for movies made by well-placed industry insiders who are under the mistaken impression that we're waiting to see what they'll do when they "stretch." Festivals give them a chance to show off their little art projects to a receptive or at least indulgent audience, including fellow insiders and aspirants to insiderdom who will at least make a big show of getting the in-jokes. ("That gross, disgusting security guard character--do you think it was supposed to be Harvey!?") Finding Amanda was written and directed by Peter Tolan, who wrote Analyze This, co-wrote America's Sweethearts, worked on various TV series (Murphy Brown), and is the creator and co-producer of Rescue Me, a crime against humanity that is sometimes miscategorized as a TV show. His new movie stars Matthew Broderick, whose opportunities for leading movie roles are contracting as his neck expands, as a once-promising TV writer who smashed his career up on the shoals of a triumvirate of addictions (drugs, booze, and gambling) and has now managed to crawl back to a job writing a third-rate sitcom. (The at-work scenes come complete with a self-deprecating cameo appearance by Ed Begley, Jr.) The plot kicks into gear when Broderick, whose control over his gambling jones turns out to be notional at best, finds out that his niece Amanda (Elizabeth Rice) is down in Las Vegas turning tricks for drug money. Broderick's long-suffering wife (Maura Tierney) has just discovered a wad of betting slips that he inexplicably stuffed into the glove compartment of their car after spending an afternoon at the track, so since the time he had set aside to work on his marriage has just been freed up, he decides to swing over to Vegas and persuade Amanda of the joys of rehab.
Casting Broderick in a role like this--a variant of the kind of wild-man character that Tolan has been writing for Denis Leary on TV--is a bigger gamble than some of the bets made in Vegas by people who were last seen being escorted out to the desert by men shaped like monster trucks. I don't guess there's any hard and fast rule that states that an out-of-control thrillseeker with an addictive personality can't also be a finicky little dweeb with an unearned sense of entitlement, but who would want to watch such a creature? The best of Broderick's recent movies--Election, which, come to think of it, wasn't really all that recent--exploited his movie past by suggesting that fifteen-odd years of wear and tear had turned Ferris Bueller into his old arch-nemesis, the high school principal. Finding Amanda takes advantage of his stage background as Neil Simon's youthful alter ego, if you can call that an advantage. His comedy-writer character trudges through the movie spitting out a steady stream of unfunny, mechanical one-liners and sorry excuses for smart-ass remarks. If this is a deliberate method of showing what years of self-abuse have done to the guy's talent, the fact remains that it's the audience that's stuck listening to them. Finding Amanda never gets enough of a handle on its unlikable hero--it's not clear whether he's meant to be as big an unrepentant asshole as he seems to be, or even whether he really cares about the niece or just wants a chance to go on a Vegas spree while telling himself that he's on a quest. Most of the best work in the movie is done by people, like Tierney, whose roles are so small that its as if they were pressed into service after dropping by the set because they heard the catering was really good. Steve Coogan turns up for a couple of scenes as a casino manager who describes one of Broderick's past indiscretions as "a minor non-event," and that's about the most accurate self-description that Finding Amanda could hope for.