Flirting With Disaster movie review (1996)

The agents, who are lovers, volunteer to tag along on the last leg of the journey, to Antelope Springs, N.M., where Mel at last meets his real natural parents (Alan Alda and Lily Tomlin), and discovers that they gave him up for adoption because they were sentenced to prison for manufacturing "a very small amount, relatively," of LSD.

All of this is not nearly complicated enough, and so Russell stirs in their younger son (Glenn Fitzgerald), an angry punk hipster who has a quail recipe that involves LSD. Meanwhile, the sexual tension between Mel and Tina heats up, while one of the gay federal agents decides he is bisexual after all, and is attracted to Nancy.

Screwball comedy is the most difficult of all genres, I wrote just the other week (in reviewing "Two Much," which proved abundantly just how difficult).

"Flirting with Disaster'' has the sort of headlong confidence the genre requires. Russell finds the strong central line all screwball begins with, the seemingly serious mission or quest, and then throws darts at a map of the United States as he creates his characters. He is also wise enough to know that all the characters don't have to be funny all the time; there is a quiet pathos in the character of Nancy, and Patricia Arquette does a subtle job of establishing her feelings: She's a new mother who should be the center of attention, and has been blindsided by this manic quest and by the allure of Tina. "She may be attractive, but she's got a screw loose,'' Nancy warns her husband.

Among the other pleasures of "Flirting with Disaster" is the way we cannot predict the movie's next turn. There are conventions in this sort of story, and Russell seems to violate most of them. He allows the peculiarities of his characters to lead them away from the plot line and into perplexities of their own. To watch that happening is a lot of fun.

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