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I
Heart Huckabees
David O. Russell, USA, 2004
Rating: 3.3
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Posted: October 26,
2004
By
Laurence Station
In movieland, everything's connected. Contrivance ties the whole ball of
wax together, from studio to director to actors to grips. Very rarely do
things happen by chance (and those that do usually get cleaned up in
post-production). In the real world, things aren't so cut-and-dried.
Certainly there's an interconnectedness to things (that accident on the
Interstate you take to work in the morning will affect you). But
although the flapping of butterfly wings on one side of the globe can
generate tsunamis half a world away, direct exposure to such connectedness,
or coincidences, is extremely difficult to pick out and label. Besides,
where's the spontaneity (and, by extension, thrill) of life if we could see
behind the curtain at the Oz-like machinations cranking the universal gears?
David O. Russell (Three Kings, Flirting With Disaster,
Spanking the Monkey) asks all sorts of coincidental, random-chance,
being-and-nothingness type questions in I Heart Huckabees. Luckily,
Russell is smart enough to make the film a comedy. No one goes to the movies
seeking the meaning of life, and Russell wisely concedes this point, even if
he has larger pretensions than, say, Weekend at Bernie's did
regarding one's higher purpose. But Russell stays fairly conventional with
Huckabees, reigning things in when he could veer off into wonderfully
absurdist territory. And this is unfortunate, because his setup lends itself
to some cosmos-altering payoff that never materializes.
Albert Markovski (Jason Schwartzman) is a poet and environmentalist fighting
for greenspace against encroaching suburban sprawl. In his crosshairs is
gigantic retailer Huckabees, which has its sights set on a marshy area of
land for its next superstore. The face of Huckabees, as far as Albert is
concerned, is generically named golden boy Brad Stand (Jude Law), an up and
coming executive who co-opts Albert's plan to save the marsh and turns it
into a PR bonanza for the retail giant. Albert's envy of and disgust with
Brad leads him to a pair of "existential detectives," Bernard (Dustin
Hoffman) and Vivian (Lily Tomlin). Albert's pretense for hiring the pair is
to determine what a string of coincidences involving the repeated sighting
of a tall African immigrant has anything to do with his day-to-day
existence.
The issue at the heart of Huckabees is Albert's disdain for Brad for
being everything he's not, only to learn that they're not all that
different. In the interim we're introduced to a host of others connected to
Albert and the existential detectives: a militantly anti-petrol fireman,
Tommy (Mark Wahlberg, doing good work); Brad's vapid, confused girlfriend
Dawn (Naomi Watts); and Caterine Vauban (Isaelle Huppert), the very French,
nihilistic antithesis to Bernard and Vivian's hopeful, "everything's
connected" optimists. Hoffman, Tomlin and Huppert essentially serve as
helpful intermediaries (with the randy Huppert character getting very
hands-on with young Albert), assisting the stray lambs in finding their way
back to the fold and helping them to learn a little something about
themselves along the way.
Rather than take a stab at explaining the meaning of life, Russell does what
all God-like filmmakers typically do: he simply ties up loose ends and rolls
the credits. Huckabees is entertaining (though Schwartzman's Albert,
a conflicted self-loathing narcissist desperate to be Brad, minus the glib
shallowness, isn't exactly a character worth liking or rooting for), and the
cast is strong. But it would have been refreshing to see Russell run off the
edge of the cliff and really throw the audience for a loop. As the film
ends, the Huckabees universe isn't much different from the way we're
introduced to it nearly two hours earlier. Circular logic? Nah. It's just
another pleasant, ultimately disposable detour to movieland.
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