Matthew Broderick made his name
playing the ultimate cool kid in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, only to find a niche playing
putzes, losers, and sad sacks. In the black comedy Finding Amanda, directed by veteran television
writer Peter Tolan (Rescue Me, The Larry Sanders Show), Broderick once again plays an
anti-Ferris—a jittery, tightly wound television writer who swapped
alcoholism and drugs for a slightly more socially sanctioned gambling
addiction. Over the course of the film, Broderick is emasculated, mocked,
fired, threatened, humiliated, and beaten up. It's enough to drive a man to
drink, and drink Broderick does, backsliding blearily into his bad old habits.
Amanda's gimmicky plot sends Broderick's
depressed, anxious hack upriver to the bubbling cesspool of sin that is Las
Vegas to convince niece Brittany Snow to check into rehab after descending into
prostitution and club drugs. Upon touching down in a city rife with temptation,
Broderick is surprised to find Snow seemingly content with her sordid lot in
life, so long as she gets to keep her tacky little dream house and asshole
boyfriend Peter Facinelli. Both wedded to delusions, Broderick and Snow share a
penchant for self-destructiveness that only grows more pronounced as Broderick
falls off the wagon hard and gives in to his compulsion to gamble.
Broderick makes for a prickly,
flawed anti-hero, but he's a veritable saint compared to the pimps, whores,
drug dealers, phonies, and gun nuts with which the film surrounds him.
Facinelli, in particular, couldn't be any more of a cretinous, deplorable,
sub-Kevin Federline caveman if he wielded a club and wore a loincloth
advertising Axe body spray. Blackly superficial, Amanda is pitched somewhere between a dark
night of the soul and the pilot for one of those self-consciously edgy
pay-cable shows that glory in the freedom of being able to show boobs, drugs,
profanity, and wanton bad behavior. Broderick has an affecting speech late in
the film once he rouses himself from his downward spiral and experiences a
moment of clarity, but Finding Amanda mostly seems content to skate briskly along the
surface, seldom mining Broderick and Snow's predicaments for anything more than
snarky gags and bitter one-liners. It's amusing but facile, reasonably clever
but hopelessly glib. As the old saying goes, you can take the writer out of
television but you can't take the television out of a writer.