Flirting With Disaster A Film Review By Michael Redman Copyright 1996 By Michael Redman
**** (out of ****)
>From the commercials, this looks like a mild-mannered Neil Simonesque tale with Mary Tyler Moore baring her bra touted as the highlight. Instead it turns out to be a hilarious film running in high gear from beginning to end.
The concept is deceptively pedestrian. An adult adopted son is looking for his biological parents and encounters eccentric characters along the way. The movie demonstrates just how far a good script and actors can take a mundane idea.
The son and his wife take off on the search accompanied by a woman from the agency who located his parents. Following one dead end lead after another, each funnier than the previous, they eventually end up in New Mexico with his real biological parents: Alan Alda and Lily Tomlin.
It's difficult to condense the mile-a-minute plot. Seemingly hundreds of scenes jump on top of each other without giving you a chance to recover from the last one.
Without giving too much away, one of the better episodes involves a gay federal Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agent attempting an arrest while tripping on LSD as his bi-sexual partner is upstairs licking the armpit of a woman while her husband is in the next room seducing their traveling companion. And it's all done in a fairly clean, almost (well, maybe not exactly) family fare manner.
A grand cast (Tomlin, Alda, Moore, Ben Stiller, Patricia Arquette, Tea Leoni, George Segal) interacts in a seamless parade of laughs. Drawing from a more hyper Woody Allen style, the film succeeds beyond expectations.
[This appeared in the 4/18/96 "Bloomington Voice", Bloomington, Indiana. Michael Redman can be contacted at redman@bvoice.com]
-- mailto:redman@bvoice.com This week's film review at http://www.bvoice.com/ Film reviews archive at http://us.imdb.com/M/reviews_by?Michael%20Redman
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