FLIRTING WITH DISASTER (77)

Directed by: David O. Russell

Starring: Ben Stiller, Patricia Arquette, Tea Leoni, Alan Alda, Lily Tomlin

The Pitch: A neurotic New Yorker, given up for adoption as a baby, finds he's unable to name his newborn child - or generally settle down with his long-suffering wife - until he's tracked down his real parents.

Theo Sez: Easy enough to criticise - and the criticisms are mostly valid : both the visuals and many of the one-liners are TV-like (though, to be fair, the same could be said of ANNIE HALL) and, as in SPANKING THE MONKEY, there's something dispiritingly neat and just-so about Russell's writing - even when he has Arquette sitting on the toilet as she talks to husband Stiller it's not done for effect but to make a point (something about romance-vs.-marriage). You couldn't imagine him doing something like the comically arbitrary identical-twin ending that so happily (and audaciously) resolved THE PALM BEACH STORY back in 1942 - yet, incredibly, this infectiously enjoyable movie feels, scene by scene, very much like one of Sturges's satiric farces. For one thing it moves, fizzing along on snappy, constantly inventive dialogue and nary a duff scene ; for another it's topical in a light, irreverent way, touching on 90s preoccupations like carjacking and gay marriages just long enough to get a laugh before moving on (not unlike the treatment of things like Momism and crooked politicians in HAIL THE CONQUERING HERO) ; and, for another, it's beautifully structured - not just the mathematical exits-and-entrances structure of Feydeau farce but a rolling, snowballing rhythm in which A leads to B leads to C, like one of those Heath Robinson contraptions where a bowling ball rolls down a chute lowering a pulley that raises a candle that bursts a balloon. Easy to under-rate (especially if you don't much care for farce), not least because it makes so little fuss about its happiness-in-your-own-backyard message; it's quite possible to miss its shrewd central joke - that the hero is actually much more like his adoptive parents than anyone in the gallery of possible blood-kin - without feeling in the least short-changed. But it's actually a very rich movie. (P.S. On second viewing - though the rating is unchanged - some of the above seems inaccurate ; specifically, I think I was wrong with the Sturges comparison. The best reference-point is undoubtedly BRINGING-UP BABY - which I think is intentional, and is probably why Stiller's character is an entomologist, echoing palaeontologist Cary Grant in the Hawks classic (it's certainly irrelevant to the plot - and this is the kind of film where nothing is irrelevant to the plot). Whatever its provenance, a fabulous movie.)