Flirting With Disaster, the second film from idiosyncratic writer/director David O. Russell, is a quirky family comedy with much to recommend it. Russell's metier clearly seems to be The Family (his first film was the incest-themed Spanking the Monkey), and his ideas here have to do with the comforts of familial relationships and the relative absurdity of a search for one’s absolute genetic roots. To this end, he enlists the aid of a cast of forlorn 20-somethings (Ben Stiller, Patricia Arquette, Tea Leoni), madcap grownups (Mary Tyler Moore, Lily Tomlin, Alan Alda), and assorted weirdo character actors. It takes a little while for all these disparate elements to gel, and when they do, Flirting With Disaster is at its best -- engaging and thoughtful, but not exactly compelling.
As Mel Copland, a new father who was adopted as an infant and is now enlisting the help of Tina Kalb (Leoni), a curious psychiatrist who wants to observe him as he meets his "real" parents, Stiller bounces off everyone else in the cast, but remains dishearteningly deadpan. He’s the essential emotional center of this ensemble cast, and maybe it’s a calculated risk that his character is a complete blank -- but it’s a misstep. Stiller’s way too flat in this role. His early scenes with Arquette are painstakingly authentic but stiff, and as a result, it’s hard to believe in these two as a couple. Worse, Moore and (especially) George Segal can’t really work their own characters. They play Stiller’s adoptive parents, and their first bickering scene is disastrously off-tempo, with even conscientious editing unable to punch up their stilted delivery.
It’s all too easy to identify with Arquette, who’s just great as Stiller’s goodhearted but underappreciated and exasperated partner, Nancy. Leoni is certainly easy to watch, and she leads the film solidly through its three distinct episodes, taking Mel and Nancy (Arquette) in hand -- infant in tow -- on a trip to San Diego, where Mel will be reunited with his biological mother. Or not. If it were really that simple, Russell wouldn’t have his madcap farce. As a matter of course, we learn there’s been a mix-up and the maternal figure that Mel has already come to awkward terms with is not, in fact, his mother. In a predictably comic turn of events, our intrepid explorer winds up zig-zagging into Michigan and finally tracking down his predestiny in New Mexico.
Flirting With Disaster is at it’s best when it figures out where it wants to be. In this case, it’s at Mel's biological home away from home, where Tomlin and Alda chew up the scenery as an old married couple with a thing for crafts, LSD, and the Grateful Dead. And the chemistry between Stiller and Arquette is a little better when they’re given something to fight over -- namely, Mel’s psychosexual attraction to surrogate mother figure Tina and Nancy’s latent response to old high school friend Tony (Josh Brolin, who shows up as a bisexual FBI agent). It’s indicative of the film’s easy charm that these relationships are acknowledged and even acted on, but never consummated -- like a TV sitcom, the ensuing zaniness doesn't jeopardize the essential happy family that seems to be key to the director's thesis. Me, I was waiting for the bottom to fall out. Russell’s characters are incorrigible flirts, and it's admirable that Mel and Nancy can be true to one another, but wouldn't it be a more interesting story if disaster had in fact struck, forcing them to come to terms with each other as they figured out how to pick up the pieces?
