Review of Flirting with Disaster (1996) by Dan M — 23 Mar 2014

This might be the best Ben Stiller movie you've never heard of, even though Stiller is actually largely playing the straight man here. It's also a great example of what David O. Russell was capable of earlier on in his career, and honestly it's more interesting than his three most recent Best Picture nominees - The Fighter, Silver Linings Playbook, and American Hustle all seem pretty generic in comparison to this, his second film. So it's a shame it's been largely forgotten about, as it's one of the best recent screwball comedies I can think of.

The movie's initial premise is that it follows a new father (Ben Stiller) who suddenly feels compelled to seek out the birth parents who gave him up for adoption thirty years before. He's joined in his quest by his put-upon wife (Patricia Arquette) and an attractive adoption agent (Tea Leoni). That's just the way it starts, though, really. The movie manages to be continually surprising, with one comic twist after another all the way to the end. I won't spoil anything further.

Ben Stiller provides a solid center to the movie, though we get surprisingly little insight into his character. He's mostly just the guy around whom a bunch of insanity occurs, and that's just fine. To describe the rest of the cast in detail would be to spoil the story, but I'll just say that Richard Jenkins, Alan Alda, and Lily Tomlin are all hilarious in supporting parts. This is very much a movie that relies on a large ensemble to be successful, and they're all great.

The screenplay for this movie shows the sort of inventiveness that has been lacking in Russell's more recent films. The new movies aren't bad, by any means, but they're also not terribly surprising. They're the sort of A-list middlebrow Golden-Globes-bait (that sounds insulting but isn't really) that's fine enough, but doesn't really seem to have a voice of its own and doesn't take many risks. This movie, on the other hand, seems really quite fearless. There are a number of moments when you think "They can't possibly do that!" and yet they do it anyway. I wish David O. Russell would go back to this sort of movie - the lower stakes of this sort of project allowed him to be much more daring and unexpected.