1958: Born in New York City.
1994: Spanking the Monkey.
1996: Flirting with Disaster.
1999: Three Kings.
2004: I (Heart) Huckabees.
David O. Russell majored in English and Political Science at Amherst and graduated to union organizing and literacy activism in Maine and Boston. Beginning with documentation of workers’ conditions, he went on to an internship at PBS and got grants to make a number of short films.
Spanking the Monkey, his directorial debut feature, won awards at Sundance and the Independent Spirit Awards, and this maverick filmmaker was on his way, shocking and amusing audiences with a ribald incest comedy. Jeremy Davies plays a would-be medical student stuck at home for the summer with Alberta Watson, his bedridden mother, hobbled by a leg cast. A time of baleful frustration yields to forbidden desires, both hilarious and poignant.
Russell went on to even greater success with slapstick family dysfunction in the uproarious Flirting with Disaster. Ben Stiller is a sad sack who feels he can’t name his own child until he finds out who his real parents are. Adoptive parents Mary Tyler Moore and George Segal are dismayed, and wife Patricia Arquette is bemused, but adoption counselor Tea Leoni is determined to help on his quest. After several misdirections, he discovers his superannuated hippie birthparents, Lily Tomlin and Alan Alda. Two gay FBI agents are along for the ride, and chaos ensues. Screwball but smart, this film begins to crystallize the director’s subversive sensibility.
Moving from the familial to the political, Russell is equally subversive in Three Kings, set in Iraq during the chaotic aftermath of the first Gulf War. He turns the war film genre on its head, mixing it with crime caper and irreverent satire. George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, and Ice Cube are ambiguous heroes, going off-mission to pursue their own treasure hunt, but coming into uncomfortably close contact with the Iraqis themselves. Incisive and funny, speedy and unpredictable, Russell has evolved his own idiosyncratic style.
Even if his next film, I (Heart) Huckabees, bumped up against the limits of that style, he deserves credit for pursuing his own vision of things. Two more sad sacks, Jason Schwartzman and Mark Wahlberg, hire the team of “existential detectives,” Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin, to ferret out the source of their malaise. The Hoffman character, based on Robert Thurman, Uma’s dad, with whom Russell studied Buddhism, espouses theories of the connectedness of everything, while rival French existentialist Isabelle Huppert stresses the meaninglessness of it all. It all collapses into too-muchness, but you have to acknowledge the filmmaker's boldness in addressing the biggest themes with the most fearless humor.
Who knows where David O. Russell will turn his sharp wit next, but you can be sure that it will be funny and thought-provoking, dazzling and daring.
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