‘Flirting With Disaster’, a chaotic Ben Stiller comedy, turns 30
The comedy about a new father looking for his birth parents remains the only David O. Russell movie that I’ve ever liked.
David O. Russell’s Flirting With Disaster, from 1996, is a comedy in which a great deal of things don’t make much sense.
Ben Stiller plays a new father, who, for some reason, has not yet named his baby, who is several months old. Stiller’s character, an adoptee named Mel, has chosen that particular moment in his life to search for his birth parents and has held off on the naming decision until he meets them.
Stiller is having trouble being attracted to his wife, played by Patricia Arquette, looking how Patricia Arquette looked a couple of years after True Romance. Their marriage is strained by both the stress of new parenthood and the inexplicable decision to go on a long, open-ended road trip, which is the last thing a couple with a newborn baby should ever think about doing. And even within that premise, few of the individual plot machinations have any logic at all.
Despite all that, it’s a movie I like quite a lot- and it’s the only movie Russell has directed that I have any affection for at all.
Released in March of 1996, 30 years ago this week, Flirting With Disaster came from Miramax and fit in well with the ‘90s indie comedy ethos, although it debuted at Cannes instead of Sundance.
Stiller had directed and co-starred in Reality Bites two years earlier, and directed The Cable Guy later on in 1996. But Flirting With Disaster was his first leading role in a movie.
Mel, the Stiller character, was adopted and raised by neurotic Jews (George Segal and Mary Tyler Moore) who talk and act like George Costanza’s parents; MTM, surprisingly, keeps taking her shirt off. Seeking answers about his origins, he’s hired the world’s least competent adoption agent, Tina (Tea Leoni), who insists on tagging along in the process and videotaping everything.
They set off on a road trip to meet the prospective parents, a journey that, thanks to Tina’s screwups, keeps leading them to the wrong places, throughout the country. Larry David would go on to lift the plot of Flirting With Disaster for a whole season arc of Curb Your Enthusiasm, including the part about where’s there’s deep cognitive dissonance that he could be anything besides a Jew.
Amid marital tension, the Mel drifts toward an affair with Tina. And once they’re joined by a pair of ATF agents (Richard Jenkins and Josh Brolin) who are also a gay couple, Nancy grows close to Brolin’s character, who’s much more attentive to Nancy’s needs than her husband ever was.
The third act is the best and funniest part of the movie, by far, as the group meets the actual parents, played by Alan Alda and Lily Tomlin, who, it turns out, gave Mel up for adoption because they were headed to prison for making LSD. That’s only the start of the chaos, which leads things back to around where they started.
Alda and Tomlin are especially a highlight, as something 1990s popular culture returned to frequently: Catching up with 1960s types, having reached middle age in a very different world.
