Flirting with Disaster (1996)

Film: Flirting with Disaster (1996)

Stars: Ben Stiller, Patricia Arquette, Tea Leoni, Alan Alda, Mary Tyler Moore, George Segal, Lily Tomlin, Richard Jenkins, Josh Brolin

Director: David O. Russell

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2024 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the women who were once crowned as "America's Sweethearts" and the careers that inspired that title (and what happened when they eventually lost it to a new generation).  This month, our focus is on Mary Tyler Moore: click here to learn more about Ms. Moore (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Despite starring in a Best Picture winner (and nearly taking an Oscar herself), Mary Tyler Moore was never able to have the kind of success in film that she had in television outside of Ordinary People.  She'd make just two movies in the 1980's, and would largely stick to stage work, here as a producer rather than an actress (she would win a Tony in 1985 for Best Revival for A Day in the Death of Joe Egg), and she'd have continued sporadic success on television (she'd get nominated for acting in four TV Movie/Miniseries, winning for 1993's Stolen Babies), but film work simply didn't happen for Moore.  The most significant film she made was in 1996, one of David O. Russell's earlier pictures, called Flirting with Disaster, which was a surprise hit for Miramax at the time, during an era where Miramax still meant edgy new voices in cinema rather than plush Oscar prestige projects.  So we will end our discussion of Moore with this movie, where she plays a supporting part as Ben Stiller's adoptive mother.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie focuses on Mel (Stiller), who has recently had a son with his wife Nancy (Arquette), but is unable to know what to name the baby until he knows where he comes from.  Mel was adopted as a baby by Pearl (Moore) & Ed (Segal), but has always wanted to know his birth parents.  He is trying to find this through Tina (Leoni), an adoption agent who is also clearly sparking a romantic connection with Mel, exacerbated by him seemingly not finding his wife attractive as she has not lost her baby weight yet.  This leads to a series of mishaps, including Tina incorrectly getting the birth parents wrong twice before finding out that it's Mary (Tomlin) & Richard (Alda) who are his birth parents...but they're also drug producers who after accidentally drugging one of the ATF agents that have started following Mel, Nancy, & Tina around, go on the run from the law.  Mel decides in the end that he didn't need to find his birth parents to find his identity, and ends up naming the baby Garcia after Jerry Garcia.  The end credits shows he and Nancy now happy after the anguish of finding his family.

I will own that I don't like the movies of David O. Russell as a rule (the one exception being Silver Linings Playbook).  I find the films too mean, the characters so irredeemable that I don't want them to get happy endings.  This is true for Flirting with Disaster.  Mel is an awful man, basically mistreating his wife because he thinks she's too fat, and actively trying to have a relationship with Tina even while he is putting his wife through hell.  That he gets a fully happy ending feels like a Woody Allen movie, and indeed, that's what Russell is attempting to do here without the sophistication.  All of the supporting parts, including Moore, are played as caricatures.  The best of the bunch is Josh Brolin as the world's most adorable gay ATF agent, smitten with Nancy, though clearly also gay, but he's not in enough of the movie for you to care.  A waste of your time, even if I get that this might've read as fresh still in 1996.

Moore would work sporadically in TV guest spots throughout the rest of her life, and write two memoirs.  She'd also reunite with all of the Mary Tyler Moore ladies briefly on Hot in Cleveland (which starred her sitcom costar Betty White), a bittersweet moment because at the time their former costar Valerie Harper had just been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and wasn't expected to live much longer.  It was Moore, though, who would die first of the five women on the show.  After years of liver & kidney complications driven by diabetes and issues with alcohol, she passed away in 2017 at the age of 80 from pneumonia.  Next month, we're going to talk about another woman who, like Moore, would get her start in TV sitcoms in the 1960's, but unlike Moore, would graduate into proper movie stardom (and Oscar glory) in the years that followed.