FLIRTING WITH DISASTER
A film review by Jesus Garcia Wong
Copyright 1996 Jesus Garcia Wong
Directed by: David O. Russell Written by: David O. Russell Cast : Ben Stiller, Patricia Arquette, Tea Leoni, Alan Alda, Lily Tomlin, Richard Jenkins, Josh Brolin, Mary Tyler Moore, George Segal. Produced by : Miramax Films Rating : **** out of ***** Theatres: Capitol, Lido, Jurong, Changi.
OF CIRCUMCISION, PSYCHIC WOUNDS AND THE FAMILY SITCOM
The opening segment is something of a foretaste of this film. There's a guy's voice telling us how he tries to imagine what his biological parents look like, and on the screen we see images of a variety of oldish men and women. As his imagination plays o n, he (and we) picture these motley characters in a mix-and-match shuffle of unlikely marriages, businesswomen with bums, matrons with paint salesmen, the images coming on in a faster and faster frenzy. It's not just a witty, funny summing up of the film 's themes - you might not guess it yet, but it sets the pattern for the way the story goes on. What starts out as a step in a fairly sensible direction, gets taken on a road trip, put through a detour or two and finds itself freewheeling towards an immin ent crash.
That may not sound so different from the average family sitcom, and the general idea of the film doesn't, at first, seem so wildly distant from standard-issue Hollywood comedy : man who was adopted as a child (Ben Still er) sets out on a journey to meet his real parents, along with his wife (Patricia Arquette), his baby, and a pretty psychology-researcher (Tea Leoni) in tow. Various mix-ups, shenanigans, oddball characters and, yup, disasters follow.
But if you think you've been here before, the dialogue and the direction (by David O. Russell, who made SPANKING THE MONKEY) take it into another dimension. The dreaded T-name seems an inevitable reference point (what with a drug overdose scene and the casting of Arquette from TRUE ROMANCE) but really the point is that the foot-massage master hasn't got a monopoly on plot twists and fast, funny, irreverent lines, or on the absurdities of ordinary speech. Whether it's about circumcision, psychic wounds, oral sex, carjacking, the beauties of the armpit area, or Ronald Reagan, the script never seems to run out of hilarious invention. The best thing is how these words aren't just there for the punchlines, but are great precisely because they're said in character, like Tea Leoni's neurotically-charged psychobabbler who's able to say under assault, "It's understandable if you find this threatening".
The cast is excellent throughout, and, rather than singling out anybody, kudos are due to the fine ensemble acting, with the sometimes frenetically overlapping dialogue and the sense of a dozen different reagents colliding to the point of fission. There are some elements of a Woody Allen film in this (not to mention the hand-held camera and loose, improvisational feel of some scenes). Like Allen, Russell's interests are in the volatile sexual politics of couples and the neurotic obsessions in both pare nts and children (and everybody, really) .
Still, if you're expecting a privileged moment of revelation and emotional outpouring a la "Murphy Brown" / "Frasier"/ fill-in-the-blank-American-comedy, well, it won't happen. The film sets up expectations like these, with the lead character's search f or his origins and his hopes of self-healing, only to knock them down. If the conventional sitcom structure is to put a slightly loopy family in catastrophic conditions only to rediscover their essential lovey one-ness, FLIRTING WITH DISASTER's charact ers embark on a journey to seek that essential state but find themselves only plunging into more weirdness and dysfunctional chaos the further they go. And that, the film suggests, IS the essential family state - and you better learn to love it. Somehow , this is perversely feelgood cinema, right up to its manic end.
REVIEW's rating system: * Wait for the video. ** A little creaky, but still better than staying at home with Gotcha! *** Pretty good, bring a friend. **** Amazing, potent stuff. ***** Perfection. See it twice.
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