american gothic
by Douglas Messerli
David
O. Russell (writer and director) Flirting
with Disaster / 1996
In
nearly all of the films of David O. Russell American family life is presented
as a monstrous, nearly unendurable force which accounts for all the neuroses
and other mental problems against which the younger generation are struggling.
This is particularly evident in his 1996
film, Flirting with Disaster, wherein
the young couple, Mel and Nancy Coplin (Ben Stiller and Patricia Arquette),
blessed with a new-born, are suddenly faced with a series new crises. Not only
have they been unable to name their new baby several weeks after his birth, but
Mel has become distracted by a personal lack of identity which has further led
to his disinterest in sexual contact with his wife. Mel was adopted, raised by
a Jewish couple, Pearl and Ed (Mary Tyler Moore and George Segal), both
neurotics—Pearl is a pushy, selfish woman who, unable to listen to anyone else,
miscomprehends any statements that reach her; Ed is a man who believes in
various unverified statements passed-on by his friends—and, accordingly, Mel
has become increasingly interested in finding and meeting his birth parents. 
In the very first scene of the movie he
visits a would-be psychiatrist, Tina Kalb (Téa Leoni), who is actually still a
graduate student who, through internet connections, claims to have discovered
Mel’s true parents, and wants to film his meeting with them for her
dissertation. So off go the Coplins with baby and Kalb in tow to San Diego
where they will encounter Valerie Swaney (Celia Weston), Mel’s birth mother.
She too is a kind a monster, a political
conservative (a drawing of Ronald Reagan graces her living room wall) and
collector of kitschy glass objects who speaks in a heavily Southern accent
about her (and apparently Mel’s) Confederate forbearers. Before Kalb discovers
she has made an error in identifying this woman as Mel’s mother, Mel has
already crashed into (don’t ask how!) Swaney’s glass-filled cabinet, destroying
her beloved art objects, and has further miffed his increasingly irritable
wife.
Remaking contact with the adoption
agency, Kalb now suggests that she has now found Mel’s birth father, living
near Battle Creek, Michigan. The truck-driving Fritz Boudreau is a violent man
who, upon meeting the travelers, first attempts to run them off his property
before attempting to take them on a ride in his semi-trailer. When he offers to
show Mel how to drive, Nancy becomes determined to take their baby out of
danger, refusing to join him on the trip. Admitting that he works as an
entomologist, Mel soon discovers that Boudreau is not his father, only the man
who took him to the adoption agency. Only a few moments later, Mel crashes the
truck into a small-town post office (don’t ask how!).
Under arrest, they are met by two agents
of the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms
Dept. Paul (Richard Jenkins) and Tony (Josh Brolin), the latter of whom
attended high school with Nancy. Tony, pleased to meet up again with his
long-ago school friend and even more delighted by her baby—since he, married to
Paul, has long wanted a baby of his own—the Coplin’s get off with only a
warning, and before you can say “Schlichting,” the name, evidently of Mel’s
real birth parents, they are off to Antelope Valley, New Mexico, with the gay
officers joining them for a long-needed vacation. By this time Nancy has warmed
up to the friendly and baby-hungry Tony, and Mel has almost had a sexual fling
with Kalb.
Richard and Mary Schlichting (Alan Alda
and Lily Tomlin), although friendly and obviously open-hearted, live in a large,
rural, all-American house; yet they turn out to be even more monstrous that all
the others Nancy and Mel have met. By the time they’ve finished dinner, his
“parents” have admitted to having given up Mel because of their imprisonment
for running a LSD lab in San Francisco, and their younger son, Lonnie (Glenn
Fitzgerald) has served up a plate of
LSD-laced quail to the elder of the agents (don’t ask how!). Horrified
by the goings-on, Mel retreats to his bedroom where he discovers his wife being
licked under her arm by Tony!
When in the midst of his hallucinations,
Paul sobers up just enough to announce that he is an AFT administration
detective, Lonnie hits him over the head with a frying pan, as the trio,
scooping up their drug paraphernalia rush off to Mexico to escape imprisonment.
As in all such absurd farces, which Flirting with Disaster is, the ending is
even more outrageous, as Mel’s nervous adoptive parents arrive in a rental car
that looks just like Mel’s—the car in which the Schlichtlings are planning to
make their escape. When the Coplin elders get cold feet about confronting their
son and daughter-in-law in his birth parent’s beautiful, seemingly normal home,
they attempt to flee, inevitably in the wrong vehicle. They crash, predictably,
into the other car (don’t ask how!) and, as the police arrive, Mel’s parents
are arrested for a trunk loaded with drugs!
Don’t worry: all ends well! Mel and
Nancy find a name for their son, Garcia (as in the singer Jerry Garcia), and
patch up their relationship; Mel is only too happy to embrace the parents who
raised him; and Paul, having survived his out-of-body experiences, is a changed
man, ready to settle down to fatherhood with Tony. The last scene reveals the
Schlictlings safely ensconced in Mexico, blissfully drugged out and having
joyful sex, upon which Lonnie intrudes in his search for pot; the couple,
hardly missing a beat, insist he “get his own.
Despite its total cartoon-like reality,
Russell’s work is often genuinely funny—even if the film’s underlying vision of
family life is definitely American gothic.
Los Angeles,
March 30, 2016
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