It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .

Admirable film.

It is no surprise that in many ways human beings reflect what their parents must have been. There is a biological perspective to it as this has a lot to do with the fact that children carry their parents' genes in them. However, there is no definitive yardstick for determining the behavioral traits of children as they might or might not have been influenced by their parents. All these ideas tend to give rise to an inherent desire to know more about one's parents especially 'one's biological parents'. This is a challenging as well as a serious theme which has been humorously represented on screen by American director David O Russell. For this reason, he takes us on a hilarious, fun filled ride across two different parts of America where a married couple meets up with other oddball characters. Apart from discussing issues related to bad parenting, 'Flirting with disaster' talks about a couple's conjugal life after the birth of a baby. Although most people would not like to be found in a position to generalize a work of art, this film remains a good example of American attitudes to drugs, marriage, relationships and sexuality. Hilarity is ensured as each character carries multiple flaws.

Mel Coplin (Ben Stiller) is having a crisis after the birth of his son. He needs to find his biological parents. His horny wife Nancy (Patricia Arquette) wants to have sex. Tina Kalb (Téa Leoni) from the adoption agency finds his mother Valerie Swaney (Celia Weston) in San Diego and is willing to pay for the reunion as long as she films it for her doctoral research. His adoptive parents Pearl (Mary Tyler Moore) and Ed (George Segal) are weirdly inappropriate. Nancy is jealous of the flirting between Tina and Mel. They find out that Valerie isn't the mother after all. They track down their lowlife trucker father Fritz Boudreau. He points out that his father might actually be Richard Schlichting (Alan Alda). They run into Nancy's high school friend ATF agent Tony Kent (Josh Brolin) after Mel accidentally backs Fritz's truck into a post office. It turns out his ATF partner Paul Harmon (Richard Jenkins) is also his gay partner. Paul and Tony join them on their trip to New Mexico to meet Richard and Mary Schlichting (Lily Tomlin) who has a son Lonnie (Glenn Fitzgerald). It's sexual chaos as Mel flirts with Tina and Tony flirts with Nancy. That's before Lonnie accidentally put LSD on Paul's quail and the Coplins show up.It's super quirky, sometimes funny, and always rambling. Mary Tyler Moore is especially funny. It's a messy human train wreck careening from one end of the country to the other. Writer/director David O. Russell has pull together a cast of crazy characters in a stew of chaos. The title may be referring to the film as much as the main character. It is on the edge of being a train wreck. The fact that this stays on tracks is a miracle. Ben Stiller isn't that funny although he's tasked with the straight man role. It tries so very hard but the jokes aren't always hitting. Maybe there are too many big characters in this madcap comedy. The craziness just overwhelms everything.

Flirting with Disaster is a true companion to classic screwball comedies of the 1930s and 1940s. Not too unlike Howard Hawk's Bringing Up Baby or His Girl Friday, David O. Russell's outrageous and often funny comedy takes its absurd and wild tone to the very end, seemingly slamming on the brakes just at the moment when we feel as if there is more to learn about these characters. This may be true but Russell's intention is to show us their behavior in this particular instance, that is finding Mel's (Ben Stiller) parents.Films like this depend almost entirely on the acting and writing for success. Fortunately, here they both are superb. The cast alone makes the film worth checking out. Stiller, Patricia Arquette, Tea Leoni, all the way down to Josh Brolin and Richard Jenkins as a couple of federal agents make their characters as weird, interesting and watchable as any comedy of the last 20 years. What also succeeds is the pacing of Russell's script, which is light on drama but moves at such a rampant speed that you barely have time to catch your breath in between jokes and situations. Needless to say, this film is a treasure. Not much more can be said without ruining the marvelous surprises and bizarre circumstances it has to lay out. All that is required is to turn off your conceptions of coincidence, realism and contrivance and simply enjoy a most enjoyable story about a man looking for identity and realizing perhaps he shouldn't have.

Absent since 2004's misbegotten "I Heart Huckabees", filmmaker David O. Russell made a ramshackle screwball farce back in 1996 that's well worth revisiting on DVD, at least until his next film comes along. He was able to blend character-driven humor with moments of pure slapstick as he tracks the misadventures of Mel Coplin, a neurotic entomologist on a frantic search for his birth parents to resolve his long-standing issues with identity. Tina Kalb, a leggy, off-kilter adoption agency worker thinks she's found Mel's mother in San Diego, so Mel, Tina, and Mel's sweetly frumpy wife Nancy, nursing their five-month baby, embark on a journey that becomes ever more haphazard with every turn of events. Unsurprisingly, an attraction develops between Mel and Tina, who is anxious to get pregnant herself. They meet a gallery of eccentric characters in what becomes a memorably wacky road trip. The real coup with this under-appreciated film is the casting. Long before he sold himself up the river with execrably witless comedies like "Meet the Fockers" and "The Heartbreak Kid", Ben Stiller was a promising actor of relative subtlety, and he expertly mans the rudder as Mel with his skittish self-containment. An actress who never seems to fulfill her potential, Téa Leoni brings a mix of klutziness and sexy smarts to the incompetent Tina. As Nancy, Patricia Arquette has a soft, fuzzy quality that makes a nice contrast to Leoni's angularity.Russell was smart to cast four veterans as Mel's two sets of parents. As his adoptive parents, George Segal and a cast-against-type Mary Tyler Moore are hilarious playing classic New York Jewish stereotypes. Moore, in particular, has a field day playing the obnoxious dark side of Rhoda Morgenstern rightfully proud of her unsagging breasts. As the couple who turn out to be Mel's real parents, Alan Alda and Lily Tomlin are equally funny as graying New Mexico hippies heavy into their art and LSD. When Mel meets them, that's when the film becomes a whirlwind, "Noises Off"-type of farce with all the personal shenanigans coming to a head. Playing a gay couple who happen to be FBI agents, a surprisingly deft Josh Brolin ("No Country for Old Men") and the always dependable Richard Jenkins (superb in this year's "The Visitor") shine as bickering personality opposites. Glenn Fitzgerald as Mel's psychotic brother and Celia Weston as a Reagan-loving Southern matron round out a razor-sharp cast. It all ends rather abruptly, but Russell shows a genuine talent for juggling a lot of comic possibilities with supple dexterity. The 2004 Collector's Edition DVD is light on extras - just three deleted scenes, a few outtakes that don't compare to the final film, and a brief featurette on the film's development and production.