POST-IT MODERNISM

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

DURING A PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, WHEN THE AIR is thick with pieties about American virtue and the maintenance thereof, it is useful to be reminded that America's private life has always been a lot more entertaining than its public life. The instrument of our deliverance from this year's cant and hypocrisy is a deadpan, dead-on movie called Flirting with Disaster. In it an earnest young fellow named Mel Coplin (Ben Stiller), who has been raised by adoptive parents, sets out to find his birth parents. It's a perfectly reasonable thing to do, since the former are, respectively, a screeching bundle of nerves (Mary Tyler Moore--yes, our Mary, joyfully subverting her institutional self) and a gunnysack of defeats (George Segal). Accompanying Mel on this odyssey are his wife (Patricia Arquette), hoping that if he finds his roots he may also recover his lost libidinal energy; their baby; and a dysfunctional social worker (Tea Leoni), whose legs seem to have no end and who has a curious sideline in Indian wrestling.

Is Mom a faded Southern belle (with, naturally, a glass menagerie) who conceived Mel on a warehouse floor? Could Dad possibly be this truck-driving former Hell's Angel? Mel should be so lucky. For he turns out to be the get of the Schlictings (Alan Alda--as deliriously offcast as Moore--and Lily Tomlin), '60s dropouts who remain dangerously loyal to certain bad habits of their generation.

Upon all these folks, writer-director David O. Russell turns a bland, almost anthropological eye. Nothing surprises him and nothing outrages him, except for bed-and-breakfast lodgings, about which, at last, his movie tells the terrible truth. Usually when a Quentin Tarantino or an Oliver Stone sets out to penetrate the heart of American darkness, we sooner or later end up in hysteria and bloodshed. Russell, a much less antsy operative, practices a kind of Post-it Modernism, jotting quick notes on our secret lives and moving on. But make no mistake, he is a dangerous subversive, capable of coolly underflying any V chip ever likely to be invented.

--By Richard Schickel