Cinema
Family fortunes
Mark Steyn
David O'Russell's first film, Spanking the Monkey, was about incest and mastur- bation; his second, Flirting with Disaster, is a road comedy that continues his preoccu- pation with family, and once again presents a protagonist who's a bit of a tosser. For those of us who didn't much care for Spanking, Flirting begins worryingly with fellatio intetruptus — hang on, come to think of it (if I remember my 0-Level Latin), that should be fellatio interrupta; anyway, Mel comes home from work and Nancy instantly drops to her knees before he's had a chance to explain that he's brought a lady from the adoption agency with him. Ever since Nancy gave birth to her son, they've been 'having problems with oral sex', and Russell ill-advisedly returns to this subject from time to time, even though, as a running joke, it has nowhere to go but down. Still, I quite like the way the sex bits are cringe-making, if only because it's a most un-film-like quality and, if you ever do eavesdrop on other people's sex, it's more often embarrassing than erotic. In this instance, it helps set up Mel's character: he has a kind of excited passivity.
Mel is played by Ben Stiller, who also has a most un-film-like quality. He's sort of goofy looking, with a head that seems too large for his body and a body that seems too large for his legs. There's a moment when he's flanked briefly by two Californi- an beach bunnies and he grins inanely as if he can't believe how a guy like him wound up with a gig like this. He plays a thirty- something entomologist, adopted as a child and now panicked by his own fatherhood into embarking on a quest for his true iden- `Congratulations – its an It girl.' tity. In tow are the baby, Patricia Arquette as Nancy, and Tea Leoni as Tina, the adop- tion agency's representative. The charac- ters are briskly but efficiently delineated: Nancy has the post-partum blues, and feels bedraggled and undesirable in baggy, shapeless breast-feeding smocks; Tina is a leggy ex-dancer in foxy business suits; wherever they go, Tina's mistaken for Mel's wife and Nancy is assumed to be the nanny. Mel is vaguely dissatisfied with his adoptive parents — played, noisily, by Mary Tyler Moore and George Segal as New York neurotics — and thus game for whatever hand fate deals him. That's just as well, because Tina is spectacularly inept at her job and they criss-cross the map from one would-be biological mom or dad to another before finally finding the real real parents.
Sportingly, Mel does his best to fit in with whatever dysfunctional household he's pitched into: first, there's a chipper San Diego Reaganite mom; then a stump- toothed blue-collar trucker and his buddy in the frozen wastes of Michigan, whose initial reaction to Mel is to beat the crap out of him; finally, down in Arizona, he comes face to face with his real folks — a couple of devious, self-serving old acid- heads brimming with smug New Age clichés and played by Lily Tomlin and Alan Alda virtually as parodies of themselves. Along the way, they also get busted for demolishing a post office by two FBI agents, who turn out to be a gay couple and tag along for the ride.
Anyone who's seen what passes for com- edy in Hollywood these days will be aware that the entire genre seems determined on a one-way ticket on the oblivion express. There's a sense that all the good jokes have already been made and are just being shuf- fled around from plot to plot: this film, for example, includes one of those tiptoeing- around-the-bed-and-breakfast-to-avoid- incurring-the-wrath-of-the-old-battleaxe scenes that could have wandered in from a zillion other movies. Yet other aspects like the gay Feds — manage to be both droll novelties and brilliantly integrated. If the comedy has any point, it's as an inver- sion of the standard PC multicultural diver- sity line that all forms of family are equally valid: here, all forms of family are equally dysfunctional. So, displaying a modest amount of courage for Hollywood, Flirting manages to be both genially tolerant of the Michigan trucker's bigotry, and slyly mali- cious about the gay guy's shallowness. It runs out of steam at the end, but most comedies do, and the 80 minutes before- hand are full of good lines and terrific ensemble acting by a well-matched mix of quirky up-and.-comers and veterans who haven't done anything this good in a long while. My one reservation is that Russell shoots the slapstick scenes with a handheld camera, denying the physical gags the choreography they need. It's the comedy that's meant to be slapstick, not the filming.
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