Review: I Heart Huckabees (2004)

IN THE DARK/Jonathan Richards



I ? HUCKABEES

Written and Directed by David O. Russell

Rated R, 105 minutes



ALL OR NOTHING



"What is this movie about?" a friend asked me.

"It's...it's an existential comedy."

He shook his head impatiently. "That's not good enough."

He meant my description. But his criticism could double for the movie
itself. Existential Comedy is not on the A list of popular movie genres.

And yet how can you not embrace a picture that offers Lily Tomlin and
Dustin Hoffman as a husband-and-wife team of existential detectives? One that
pits them against their former disciple turned nihilist author, Isabelle
Huppert? A movie in which Tomlin's first question to a client is "Have you
transcended time and space?" ("Time, yes," he replies. "Not space." After a
moment he amends that. "Neither, actually. I have no idea what you're talking
about.")

Albert Markovski (Jason Schwartzman) is an environmental activist and poet
who heads up a well-meaning but ineffective little outfit called the Open
Spaces Coalition. The group is trying to protect a pocket of wetlands from the
encroachment of a giant Target-like department store called Huckabees.
Albert's nemesis in this battle is Huckabees executive Brad Stand (Jude Law), a
shallow, glad-handing smoothie who has already engineered the takeover of most
of the endangered land. Now Stand is seeking to finish the job by taking over
the Coalition itself, with sweet-talking protestations of environmental
concern. In an era of black-is-white environmental scams like the Clear Skies
Initiative, audiences will recognize the unctuous faux concern of the wolf in
sheep's clothing.

While he is struggling against Stand and Huckabees, Albert is disconcerted
by three separate coincidental sightings of the same tall, gangly Sudanese
doorman. It must mean something! At the same time he finds in his pocket the
business card of the Existential Detective Agency of Vivian and Bernard Jaffee
(Tomlin and Hoffman). So many coincidences can't be coincidence; Albert
decides to pay the agency a visit and enlist its help in sorting out the things
that are troubling him.

The crux of this movie is the struggle of everyman to uncover the meaning
of life, if in fact life has any meaning. Hoffman and Tomlin serve up one
major portion of that search with a pair of wonderful comic performances as the
Jaffees. They espouse the "blanket theory" of universal interconnectedness:
Herman, sporting a beatific smile beneath what looks like a grizzled Beatles
toupee, holds up a blanket to illustrate how everything is part of a material
whole. "This is you here," he explains to Albert, poking a finger into one part
of the fabric, "and over here – this is Paris!" The Jaffees undertake to
follow Albert and spy on him twenty-four/seven ("Even in the bathroom?"
"Yes.") And they pair him with another client, Tommy Corn (Mark Wahlberg) for
mutual support.

Tommy, however, has already begun to slip into doubt. A firefighter
caught deep in the undertow of post-9/11 stress, he has started a drift toward
the teachings of Caterine Vauban (Huppert), an apostate former pupil of the
Jaffees who has gone over to the dark side. Nothing is connected, she teaches.
Nothing has meaning. All is cruelty and manipulation. The theory has a
certain appeal to the depressed Tommy, and so does the shapely Caterine. And
lest the movie be accused of drifting too far into the cerebral and the
spiritual, Caterine and Tommy obligingly plunge into a bout of romantic
mud-wrestling.

Tomlin and Hoffman provide reason enough to see this movie, but the cast
is stacked with talent. Naomi Watts plays Brad Stand's girlfriend Dawn, the
Huckabees TV huckster who morphs into a virtual Mennonite lass. Wahlberg gives
one of his best performances, stepping out into a character role with
determination and vulnerability. And the conflict in philosophies that informs
the movie is played out beautifully in the contrasting performances of
Schwartzman and Law.

Director and co-writer David O. Russell, who launched his career with
Spanking the Monkey (1994) and crowned it with Three Kings (1999), knows a bit
about taking chances. Madcap as this movie is, it comes as a cry from the
heart. As Russell pits his characters against each other and their opposing
values, some of it comes out hilarious, some of it blunt and raw. Sometimes
the movie itself is an affirmation of the Jaffees' philosophy that everything
is tied mysteriously together; at other times it illustrates Caterine's theory
of disconnectedness.

Our movies can be like our relationships. Sometimes we don't ask nearly
enough of them; sometimes we ask too much. Perhaps it doesn't really matter
that I ? Huckabees is on the incoherent side, that it defies both description
and comprehension with its scattershot satire of modern angst. On the plus
side, it's funny and searching and refreshingly intelligent. It includes
plenty of physical comedy and verbal wit, but it also reaches beyond to scratch
at the funnybone of the intellect. It has provoked such a range of critical
reaction, from contempt to adulation with stops at most of the stations along
the way, that it may be truly a classic of the
"you've-got-to-see-it-for-yourself-and-decide" category.

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