RUSSELL FLIRTS WITH CINEMATIC SUCCESS\Writer-director's 'Disaster' draws bevy of stars intrigued by\comedic tale of family dysfunction.

Byline: Bob Strauss Daily News Film Writer

Pity the parents of David O. Russell. On the one hand, they have to be proud of their son, whose first two feature films, "Spanking the Monkey" and the just-released romantic comedy "Flirting With Disaster," have earned the young writer-director more acclaim than any new filmmaker since Quentin Tarantino.

On the other hand, Russell's folks can't be very thrilled with the jaundiced view of family life their son so knowingly, amusingly puts on the screen. "Monkey" was a dicey dark comedy that addressed, among other extreme dysfunctions, mother-son incest. "Flirting," though lighter-toned and screwball silly at times, is also very much about how difficult it is for close relations - through blood, marriage or just proximity - to tolerate each other.

"I'm sure they'll go to the mall in Florida and see it," New York-raised Russell said, by way of explaining why he hasn't screened "Flirting" for his parents. "Maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised and they'll enjoy it. But my mother is easily mortified. I think she'll feel I've exploited them again. And I have, I make no bones about it."

In the movie, Ben Stiller plays Mel Coplin, a new father who's having doubts about his marriage. His wife, Nancy (Patricia Arquette), is worried that motherhood has diminished her sex appeal. Mel says, "No honey, of course not," yet he's suddenly more interested in finding the couple that gave him up for adoption as an infant than he seems to be in her.

Mel's adoptive parents, played by Mary Tyler Moore and George Segal, are classic New York neurotics. And after an outrageous cross-country misadventure, the biological parents (Alan Alda and Lily Tomlin) he finally finds turn out to be pretty weird themselves.

Russell admitted that "Flirting" is very loosely inspired by personal experience.

"The film is kind of a snapshot of my life at that time," he said. "I'd just had a son, and I was feeling real disoriented in my marriage. My sister had just found her biological parents. And my own parents were kind of a constant - they were as crazy as they'd always been - so I thought it would be fun to treat them in a way that was humorous instead of painful."

Regardless of what Russell's own folks may think about it, "Flirting" clearly attracted top talent to its pair of parental roles. Moore, in fact, refused to play the older mom, but campaigned passionately to be cast as the other one.

"David originally wanted Dick Van Dyke and me to be the couple that Lily and Alan played," revealed TV legend Moore, who co-starred in the classic "Dick Van Dyke Show." "He thought that it would be such a wonderful joke that Dick and Mary had gone on to become this surprisingly weird couple. I said, 'Yeah, that would be a good joke for you, but not necessarily a good actor's joke.' "

Though she wasn't into self-parody, Moore was fascinated by the intense and overbearing Pearl Coplin. The actress, whose feature film career pretty much peaked with her diametrically different, emotionally stilted mom in the 1980 "Ordinary People," was thoroughly charged by the quality of Russell's project.

"The whole script was funny; I liked the freshness of David's sense of humor," Moore said. "There are all kinds of couplings in this movie; there's a gay couple (Richard Jenkins and Josh Brolin), the neurotic Pearl and her husband, Eddie, Lily and Alan's characters. I loved the interaction of all these dysfunctional people - comedically, brilliantly written - coming together and sort of accepting each other as long as they have to, then going their own ways."

The rest of the cast echoed Moore's enthusiasm for Russell's cunning, cutting insights into relationships - and each of them, by the way, was able to relate his or her character's issues to their own lives.

"This film says that marriage is hard work," noted Arquette, who recently married "Leaving Las Vegas" star Nicolas Cage. "And that it doesn't ever stop being hard work, no matter how old you get. All these strange couples with their idiosyncrasies really couldn't be with anybody else. But it's still hard, every morning, every night."

Though she'd never been married when she made the movie, Arquette was the young mother of a now 7-year-old child. Consequently, she was more than familiar with Nancy's angst.

"I wanted to show how hard it is to make that transition from being a young girl that people want and are infatuated by, to having this baby between you - which is just like mortality," Arquette explained. "It's just like, 'You're anchored to me forever.' That shadows all of sex. And when you're a woman with a little baby, you just don't have time to be coifing yourself all the time. I wanted to be real honest about that."

Mel's profound doubts about all of his family ties, while not exactly reflective of Stiller's experience, certainly struck a chord.

"I really connected with the script on a visceral level," said Stiller, who was delighted to land a well-written, straight acting job between directing gigs on "Reality Bites" and the upcoming Jim Carrey comedy "The Cable Guy." "I'm not married, I don't have a kid and I'm not adopted, but something really hit me about it.

"I think it has to do with ("Flirting's") ideas about commitment," added Stiller, whose parents, comedians Anne Meara and Jerry Stiller, have been together for decades. "I'm 30 and I'm still not ready to get married, although I do want to have a family. There's always that struggle; those commitment issues that Mel goes through in the movie, to me, were really very familiar."

Tea Leoni, the star of TV's "The Naked Truth," plays Tina, the most obvious barrier to Mel's marital contentment in "Flirting With Disaster." An inept adoption agency counselor who's trying to distract herself from her own recent divorce, Tina accompanies the Coplins on Mel's cross-country parent search, developing a mutual attraction with the married man along the way.

"This film capitalizes on the void we all have, that as human beings we're stuck with," Leoni suggested. "You can drive yourself crazy trying to fill it. That's all about us, as individuals, saying, 'I have an idea of what my family should be' or 'If I get married, it'll all work out' or 'If I find my biological parents - where I'm from - it'll all make sense.' Maybe the lesson is that everything you need is right there, right in that today."

Russell agrees that his artistic interest lies in the troubling but humorous space between what people expect and what life dictates they should settle for.

"Relationships, families, marriages: there's always a picture that is just that, a picture," Russell reckoned. "There's always the hopefulness that all of your needs and all of your wishes are going to be met in that picture. The reality is always a lot messier and chaotic - and a lot of that chaos is made when the picture meets reality."

Russell's parents can vouch for that. "It's weird, because they get calls from all their friends who read about me and they're happy because I'm famous," the talented son said. "But at the same time, it's these really uncomfortable things that I talk about."

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Photo (1--Cover--Color) 'Flirting' with style Move over Quentin Tarantino, here comes David Russell (2) Patricia Arquette and Ben Stiller, in "Flirting With Disaster," star as Mel and Nancy Coplin, a troubled couple on a cross-country journey to find the parents who gave Mel up for adoption. (3--6) In the David O. Russell film, Mel's natural parents are played by Lily Tomlin, left, and Alan Alda, with George Segal and Mary Tyler Moore as his adoptive parents.