Flirting With Disaster (1996)

Written and Directed by David O. Russell

I rented this movie solely for the fact that it was David O. Russell, other than that it never looked very appealing, but I absolutely love I Heart Huckabees, one of the better movies of the decade so far, and Three Kings is just the Bee's Knees. Sadly, this movie can't quite keep up with those, but it's a good light comedy, for what it is.

Mel Coplin (Ben Stiller) is adopted, and while he loves his adopted parents (Mary Tyler Moore and George Segal) but his own neurotic Jew-ness that he somehow inherited from them drives him to want to know who his biological parents are, and why they got rid of him. He sets up with a social worker (Tea Leoni) who is a sexpot and not very good at her job, fresh off a divorce. Mel's wife, Nancy (Patricia Arquette) just wants her husband to finally be happy so he can settle down and help her raise their son. So they set off on a cross-country trip to find his real parents, hoping it will put his mind at ease. After a few failed attempts, Mel finally tracks down his real parents, with a lot of comical mishaps along the way.

Overall, I liked this movie, there were many scenes that made me laugh, such as an ATF agent tripping on LSD and Mel's biological parents trying to coach him through it, and Mel attempting to drive a semi-truck and backing it through a building. Otherwise, each individual scene by itself isn't wholly funny, most of it is neurotic meandering by Mel, and a lot of the scenes have a strange sensibility, the characters are privy to some understanding of each other that the audience is not aware of, a method which isn't really explained, but it really fits once he gets to I Heart Huckabees, and I would venture to say Russell even perfects this notion, unexplainable as it is. It's not that I wouldn't recommend this movie, but I definitely would recommend David O. Russell's other films before this one.

6.5/10