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Existential Heart
‘I ♥ Huckabees’ wears its angst on its sleeve
by Jesse Fox Mayshark
David O. Russell’s beguiling, bonkers I ♥ Huckabees declares its intentions right from the start. The first thing you hear is a profane interior monologue by Albert (Jason Schwartzman), the movie’s protagonist and obvious stand-in for the director (he’s even grown long, floppy hair, like Russell). “What am I doing?” he asks, between oedipal expletives. “I should just give up. Don’t give up! I should give up. Don’t give up!”
This is followed by a scene in which Albert, trying to find his way to an appointment in an office building, wanders a warren of high-rise hallways lined with identical-looking doors, getting more and more frustrated as he turns each corner.
And so it goes for the rest of the movie, as Russell puts his cast of characters through a hamster maze of personal inquisition and philosophical dithering: Why are we here? What does it all mean? Is everything connected? Is nothing connected? Does “nothing” even exist? Do you? Do I? Did I mention this is a screwball comedy?
Russell is part of a generation of filmmakers trying to make sense of life in the post-existentialist, post-post-modern, post-colonialist, post-whatever West. They came to prominence in the ’90s, but their concerns are strictly 21st century. They tend to obsess over personal connection—its presence, its absence, its fragility, its improbability, its importance. Besides Russell, they include screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich) and the directors Sofia Coppola (Lost in Translation), Spike Jonze (Adaptation), Wes Anderson (Rushmore), P.T. Anderson (Boogie Nights), David Fincher (Fight Club), Richard Kelly (Donnie Darko) and undoubtedly players to be named later.
They vary in tone and style, but they have plenty in common: an encyclopedic (or, more to the point, Googlish) awareness of film history and genre conventions; a comfort with technology and ease with digital media; shared collaborators (Schwartzman also starred in Rushmore; Boogie Nights star Mark Wahlberg is in Huckabees; Jon Brion orchestrated the scores for both Magnolia and Huckabees); and an underlying seriousness of purpose. They’re conversant with knee-jerk Gen-X snark and archness, but they mostly deploy them in the service of Big Ideas. They’re not afraid to look soft in the head or heart. Sincerity is the new irony.
Of the bunch, Russell is one of the hardest to peg. His first three movies covered a lot of ground. The low-key Spanking the Monkey dallied with incest as a metaphor for the complex cultural relationship between Baby Boomers and their progeny; Flirting with Disaster explored the same territory, but as manic yuppie paranoia; and the out-of-nowhere brutal battlefield comedy Three Kings was a great Gulf War movie at a time when nobody besides Russell and Don Rumsfeld was even thinking about Iraq.
I ♥ Huckabees is something else again, a frontal assault on the meaning of life by a guy armed primarily with one-liners. It’s a bold move, and a foolish one, and immensely aware of its own bold foolishness.
The story, in brief: Albert is an eco-activist who has struck a deal with a chain-store junior executive, Brad (Jude Law), to “preserve” open space around a new store development (the chain-store is called Huckabees, presumably because Wal-Mart was already taken). Albert’s angst about this dubious bargain propels him to a pair of “existential detectives” (Lily Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman), who promise to help him come to terms with himself. The detectives’ other clients include a philosophical firefighter (Wahlberg), whose post-9/11 awareness of the larger world has led to his own kind of environmental activism (he pedals a bicycle to fires rather than ride the truck). Also in the mix are Brad’s spokesmodel girlfriend (Naomi Watts); a mysterious French nihilist (Isabelle Huppert); and, uh, Shania Twain.
The ideas in play never rise above freshman philosophical conundrums. Russell muddles through to a general affirmation of the connectedness of all things, with requisite nods to pain and suffering. But it’s how he gets there that matters. The movie’s prevailing view of its characters is a kind of affectionate mockery that is just as hard on Albert’s idealism as Brad’s crass ambition, but ultimately sympathetic to all parties. And Russell never gets so wrapped up in his own head that he forgets to entertain—he has a particular flair for slapstick (Tomlin and Hoffman unsuccessfully dodging a lawn sprinkler, Watts dolling herself up in a ludicrous overalls-and-bonnet outfit), and plays it with a respect for the form that feels classical rather than cheap.
The jokes flag down the home stretch, but the dead spots are at least partly rescued by the admirably game cast. The old hands put on a good show—Tomlin hasn’t been so much fun since, well, Flirting with Disaster, and Hoffman maybe since Tootsie. But the most endearing performances come from Wahlberg and Watts, who play their characters’ dawning self-awareness with a straightfaced blend of bafflement, anger and wonder. Like the movie as a whole—and, Russell wants us to know, like all of us, too—they are warmly ridiculous.
October 21, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 43
© 2004 Metro Pulse
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