DIRECTOR/SCREENWRITER
David
O. Russell
PRODUCER
Dean Silvers
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Eric Edwards
MUSIC
Stephen Endelman
EDITOR
Christopher Tellefsen
CAST
Ben Stiller (Mel Coplin)
Patricia Arquette (Nancy Coplin)
Téa Leoni (Tina)
Alan Alda (Richard Schlichting)
Mary Tyler Moore (Mrs. Coplin)
George Segal (Mr. Coplin)
Lily Tomlin (Mary Schlichting)
Josh Brolin (Tony)
Richard Jenkins (Paul)
David Patrick Kelly (Fritz Boudreau)
MPAA rating: R
Running
time: 92m
U.S. release: March 22, 1996
Video availability: VHS - DVD
Other David
O. Russell films
reviewed on this website:
- Three
Kings
|
This
is certainly a bizarre season for movie comedies. The first big
laugh-fest of the year, The Birdcage, hid its family-values
warmth in subversive clothing. Flirting with Disaster,
which is shaping up to be the next big comedy, does the exact
opposite. It starts off with a Republican-friendly unit -- successful
husband, pretty wife, adorable newborn son -- and proceeds to
trash every possible familial concept. Clearly, this theme is
close to David O. Russell's jaded heart. His previous film, Spanking
the Monkey, was a jet-black comedy about an ailing mom who
seduces her hapless college-age son. Yet for all his cynicism,
Russell doesn't hate his characters. He sees them as deeply confused
human beings whose struggles to preserve family unity are in
direct proportion to their inability to do so. His scripts are
also rude and profane, which is a big plus.
Flirting with Disaster follows yuppie Mel (Ben Stiller),
his wife Nancy (Patricia Arquette), and their unnamed baby on
a quest across America. Mel, whose new fatherhood has rattled
him, thinks that finding his biological parents will give him
a better idea of "who he is." His overbearing adoptive
parents (Mary Tyler Moore and George Segal, both hilarious) think
it's a stupid idea, and the movie keeps proving them right.
Mel and Nancy are guided, more or less, by a woman from the adoption
agency -- Tina (Téa Leoni, from TV's The Naked Truth),
one of those people whose confident façade hides the fact
that they have no idea what they're doing. Tina leads the couple
to one false parent after another, and this section of the movie
gets a little elitist; we're meant to be mortified by the idea
that a Reagan-worshipping woman or a scruffy truck driver could
be Mel's real parents. Then Mel and company arrive in Arizona,
where they finally meet the real McCoys -- Alan Alda and Lily
Tomlin, who quickly take over the movie. Playing these ex-hippies
(who still drop acid and have their own pharmacological lab in
the cellar), the comedy veterans work together so smoothly that
Flirting with Disaster would be worth seeing just for
their scenes, even if the rest of the movie were junk.
Fortunately, it isn't. David O. Russell has a sharp ear for satirical
dialogue, and he loves to put his characters in the kinds of
horrific, embarrassing situations that make you hide your face
even as you're laughing. Like The Birdcage, Flirting
with Disaster is a farce -- a machine that rolls slowly but
surely into chaos. It also rolls right over such things as logic
and credibility, but that's the nature of farce. Usually, some
lesson emerges from the wreckage. Here, as in Spanking the
Monkey, it's that the imperfect family unit itself isn't
nearly as destructive as the expectations we attach to it. The
pain and comedy of families lie in the distance between the ideal
and the reality. In his cheerfully twisted way, Russell is making
the healthiest, sanest comedies around -- entertainment for the
whole dysfunctional family. |
