of circumcision , psychic wounds and the family sitcom the opening segment is something of a foretaste of this film .
there 's a guy 's voice telling us how he tries to imagine what his biological parents look like , and on the screen we see images of a variety of oldish men and women .
as his imagination plays o n , he ( and we ) picture these motley characters in a mix - and - match shuffle of unlikely marriages , businesswomen with bums , matrons with paint salesmen , the images coming on in a faster and faster frenzy .
it 's not just a witty , funny summing up of the film 's themes - you might not guess it yet , but it sets the pattern for the way the story goes on .
what starts out as a step in a fairly sensible direction , gets taken on a road trip , put through a detour or two and finds itself freewheeling towards an immin ent crash .
that may not sound so different from the average family sitcom , and the general idea of the film does n't , at first , seem so wildly distant from standard - issue hollywood comedy : man who was adopted as a child ( ben still er ) sets out on a journey to meet his real parents , along with his wife ( patricia arquette ) , his baby , and a pretty psychology - researcher ( tea leoni ) in tow .
various mix - ups , shenanigans , oddball characters and , yup , disasters follow .
but if you think you 've been here before , the dialogue and the direction ( by david o . russell , who made spanking the monkey ) take it into another dimension .
the dreaded t - name seems an inevitable reference point ( what with a drug overdose scene and the casting of arquette from true romance ) but really the point is that the foot - massage master has n't got a monopoly on plot twists and fast , funny , irreverent lines , or on the absurdities of ordinary speech .
whether it 's about circumcision , psychic wounds , oral sex , carjacking , the beauties of the armpit area , or ronald reagan , the script never seems to run out of hilarious invention .
the best thing is how these words are n't just there for the punchlines , but are great precisely because they 're said in character , like tea leoni 's neurotically - charged psychobabbler who 's able to say under assault , " it 's understandable if you find this threatening " .
the cast is excellent throughout , and , rather than singling out anybody , kudos are due to the fine ensemble acting , with the sometimes frenetically overlapping dialogue and the sense of a dozen different reagents colliding to the point of fission .
there are some elements of a woody allen film in this ( not to mention the hand - held camera and loose , improvisational feel of some scenes ) .
like allen , russell 's interests are in the volatile sexual politics of couples and the neurotic obsessions in both pare nts and children ( and everybody , really ) .
still , if you 're expecting a privileged moment of revelation and emotional outpouring a la " murphy brown " / " frasier " / fill - in - the - blank - american - comedy , well , it wo n't happen .
the film sets up expectations like these , with the lead character 's search f or his origins and his hopes of self - healing , only to knock them down .
if the conventional sitcom structure is to put a slightly loopy family in catastrophic conditions only to rediscover their essential lovey one - ness , flirting with disaster 's charact ers embark on a journey to seek that essential state but find themselves only plunging into more weirdness and dysfunctional chaos the further they go .
and that , the film suggests , is the essential family state - and you better learn to love it .
somehow , this is perversely feelgood cinema , right up to its manic end .
Output: P