This comedy is a real gem and not that well known. Came across the DVD recently and can't believe hadn't heard of it before with such a top notch cast. Ben Stiller acts as a man looking for his biological parents. His wife is played by Patricia Arquette. Tea Leoni is excellent and plays the adoption agency person helping them. Along the way they come across a variety of wrong parents and the right ones from San Diego to Michigan to New Mexico. The humor is original and unexpected and builds subtly to some hilarious scenarios with some sparkling dialog. Josh Brolin is great as a cop and friend of the wife. There are elements of a good play elements combined with top notch comedic talent. A must watch.

Most important is the cast. It is filled with familiar actors you just love to watch including Ben Stiller, Mary Tyler Moore, Ben Stiller, Alan Alda and Lilly Tomlin. It has a young, beardless, extremely sexy Josh Brolin looking a bit like Matt Damon. Patricia Arquette (Medium) is in it. Glenn Fitzgerald also plays a young hunk, but one so weird you could not really consider him attractive.The basic plot is Ben Stiller (Mel Coplin) travelling from place to place to find his birth parents. He runs into a number of possibilities each weird in his/her own way.Within this loose framework, it feels more like improvisation. Scenes just sort of peter out after a while. The humour is the characters running out their day-to-day (but weird) behaviour. There are not many site gags or bon mots. It is just the fun of watching weird people reacting to unfamiliar situations. I think I laughed hardest at Téo Leone with her long legs like an ostrich striding to get away from a crazed truck driver. She had to look elegant even when her life was at stake.One of the themes is adultery, just what constitutes adultery, and what you should do about it both as adulterer and adulteree. Poor Ben breaks in on a very handsome man licking his bored wife's armpit. How should he react? Etiquette books don't cover this.It is a very gay friendly movie given that in was made in 1996. Homosexuality is treated as just one more comic opportunity. The two gay characters are quite far from the stereotypes. That treatment was refreshing and funny.It is a bit of a sloppy movie, but it is fun just the same.

Scanning the other reviews on here, I realize I'm totally in the minority here. But I thought this was a total stinker.I kept watching, hoping that it would get better. But the more I watched, the more I thought the screenplay was the byproduct of watching too many Woody Allen movies.The biggest problem was that I just couldn't believe what was going on before my eyes. Maybe I'm too much of a "meat and potatoes" mindset, but the characters and situations just got more and more unrealistic and I cared less and less about these people.This is only the third David O. Russell film I've seen. SPANKING THE MONKEY was clever. After trying to watch it three times I finally gave up on I HEART HUCKABEES. After this, I've added him to my mental checklist of Film Makers to Avoid.Hack though Mr. Russell may be, though, he couldn't get a bad performance out of Richard Jenkins.

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.