FLIRTING WITH DISASTER
A film review by Jane Taylor
Copyright 1996 USPAN
This review is also posted at http://moviereviews.com/janesreviews/disaster.html
*** (out of 4)
When the cast of a movie includes names like George Segal, Mary Tyler Moore, Alan Alda and Lily Tomlin, I get the uncomfortable feeling that I'm headed out for a trip on The Love Boat. But, when it also includes the edgy Tea Leoni, Patricia Arquette and especially the chameleon-like Ben Stiller, I'll give it a shot.
This time I'm very glad I did. "Flirting With Disaster" was a hoot from the beginning video montage all the way through it's just right 86 minutes.
Stiller plays a young man, adopted as a baby and now in search of his biological parents. Leoni is the social worker from the adoption agency, who tries hard to help him, but manages to misuse her computer and send him in a couple of very wrong directions. He gamely goes along with her, determined to not only find his parents, but to bond with them, no matter what kind of gene pools they swim in.
I laughed myself into a headache when attempt number two turns up a low life truck driver in Battle Creek, Michigan and the New York Jewish entomologist Stiller eagerly embraces the chance to learn to drive a semi. He's so eager to please this macho new father figure that you're surprised when his feet actually touch the pedals.
I've now made the decision that I'll see anything that Ben Stiller is in. My last experience with him was as the dreadlocked artist Bwick in "If Lucy Fell", which he carried off with authentic, childlike innocence. In "Flirting With Disaster", his character is an earnest, angst ridden equally sincere yuppie scientist. He's a handsome man, but one who's not afraid to use his body to great physical comedy effect. He knows how to hike up the waist of his pants and look just as schleppish as his famous father, Jerry Stiller (George Costanza's father on "Seinfeld").
Leoni is wonderful as the social worker, miserably coming out of a divorce and hilariously trying to make up her mind whether to seduce Stiller or go on and have a life of her own.
Arquette adds just the right touch of sanity as Stiller's earth mother wife. In scenes where she seduces her reluctant husband, she refreshingly shows the body of a woman who hasn't entirely regained her pre-pregnancy figure. There's a touching vulnerability in her voluptuousness and the wistfulness that she's lost the part of her that made men take a second look.
Mary Tyler Moore is a stitch as his neurotic adopted mother, in a role as manipulative, unpleasant and un-Laura-Petrie-like as you could imagine her playing. Rounding out the supporting cast, Segal, Alda and Tomlin are a bit wasted. But there are gems to be found among the non-star talent, especially the unnamed actor who plays the Michigan truck driver and two other anonymous guys as the bi-sexual couple of FBI agents who bust him, then decide to go on vacation and follow the Stiller entourage to New Mexico.
Dorothy was right - there is no place like home. But "Flirting With Disaster" is a side trip worth taking, on the way to figuring out why you can't just be happy with what you have.
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