Flirting With Disaster is a delightful melange of picaresque, screwball comedy, quest and road picture about a confused doofus named Mel Coplin (Ben Stiller) with an identity crisis. The adopted Mel decides that he can't name his newborn son until he discovers who his real parents are. Accompanied by his supportive and patient wife Nancy (tenderly played by Patricia Arquette) and a cute but bumbling adoption agency official named Tina Kalb (Tea Leone), who wants to record the adventure for a study she is conducting, the family hits the road to do what Mel's neurotic adoptive mother (well played by Mary Tyler Moore) calls "the Roots thing."
The Coplin's trip is full of detours, accidents and screw-ups; as a rule, these are played for laughs, but there are moments of pathos that remind us that these characters are worth caring about. Nancy is a particularly sympathetic character, as she endures her husband's self-absorption and obvious attraction to Tina with a long-suffering patience that is almost too good to be true. Generally, however, weirdness abounds. Alan Alda and Lily Tomlin have some wonderfully whacked out moments as a Timothy Leary-like couple with a bitter and vindictive son (who serves his parent's guests a meal to be remembered). Occasionally the strangeness is affected, as with Nancy's high school boyfriend, a federal agent named Agent Tony (Josh Brolin) whose sexual ambiguity and fetish for women's armpits falls into the category of goofiness for goofiness' sake.
The movie has just the right blend of the peculiar and the real. The plot has more twists than a slinky. All the characters are oddly off centre, but only Agent Tony approaches absurdity. Flirting With Disaster satirizes our culture's ego-driven navel-gazing, but it retains a kindness and gentleness toward its characters that allows us to care about them while we're laughing at them.
