Finder’s Fee
A film that is basically a one-act play, “Finder’s Fee” doesn’t let on what it’s about until the last reel. It is obviously deliberate, as well as being an obvious response to Probst’s decision, in his first feature as writer-director, to shoot on one set and rarely leave the confines of a New York apartment without visually suffocating. This movie has a good chance at domestic distribution and offshore cable play following its divisive win as best film at the Seattle fest.
Its narrative is one of those twisty things that compel you to mentally rewind it all once you know where it’s going. While we’re re-evaluating what seemed like the central action involving a poker game and con job spinning around the table, we’re also puzzling over how Probst, now one of television’s most recognizable faces (as host of the first two seasons of “Survivor”), found time to develop, write and direct his own feature. Despite carrying strong whiffs of an industry calling-card project throughout, Probst’s drama stays strictly on theme; he may have more than exotic “Survivor” trips in his future.
Early scenes don’t make clear just how much more stagebound or less scattered this script would feel within theater conventions. Street artist Tepper (Erik Palladino) finds a wallet on his rain-drenched Gotham street near the entrance to his aptly named apartment building. He’s readying himself to propose marriage to g.f. Carla (Carly Pope), but only after hosting a poker night for his buddies.
He phones up a number he finds scribbled on a note inside wallet; it belongs to one Avery Phillips, whom he then reports having found Avery’s wallet. But then comes Fishman (Matthew Lillard), the group’s inveterate gambler; just before Fish arrives (and while sunnily humming “Singing in the Rain”), Tepper sees that a lottery ticket also found inside the wallet bears this week’s winning numbers, amounting to $6 million.
In one of several touches that smell more of greasepaint than celluloid, Tepper can hardly keep from Fishman his secret possession of the winning ticket; Fishman suffers from an especially bad case of terminal verbal diarrhea. The spew stops only with the arrival of bitter divorcee Quigley (Ryan Reynolds) and nice guy Bolan (Dash Mihok), with a fifth player MIA. A fifth is quickly found, as Avery (James Earl Jones) drops by on returning Tepper’s call.
Probst’s camera and Brian Berdan’s editing are a bit too emphatic about showing us the increasingly suspicious glances traded between Tepper and Avery; but all the same they generate some strong tension as what seems to be Tepper’s irresolvable ethical: whether to keep the ticket or give it back to its rightful owner. Actors Palladino, who puts as tight a clamp on Tepper’s emotions as he can, and Jones, who uses his bulging, penetrating eyes as a furtive weapon, make this showdown as cinematic as possible under contained circumstances.
What this movie has going for it are the poker details that could make card players scream in agony. Everything else, how the other characters and actors fit (or don’t) into this escalating face-off, remains a mess: The biggest problem is Lillard, an actor who never seems to know when to stop; and Mihok’s Bolan and Reynolds’ Quigley are more or less superfluous, or worse, plot-pivots-as-people.
That said, there’s a moment so bad that “Finder’s Fee” should have been toast right then: Pope’s unconvincing Carla delivers a “Dear John” speech into Tepper’s door buzzer speaker. And while Robert Forster (as always) brings total authority to the action as a weary street cop, his intrusion is as false as the bigger device (a police-imposed lockdown of the whole building for a suspect search) that keeps the main characters in Tepper’s digs.
Designed to within an inch of its life by Tink and lit with damp-glow style by d.p. Francis Kenny, the physical space becomes another character in this Seattle-born British Columbia-shot production.
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