Movie Gazette

Anyone who makes a film about a sexual relationship between a boy and his mother and derives its title from a colloquialism for male masturbation is clearly a director who wants you to sit up and take notice – and that is just what David O. Russell did with his feature debut ‘Spanking the Monkey’ (1994). There quickly followed his indie adoption farce ‘Flirting with Disaster’ (1996), and the more mainstream, but no less subversive, Gulf War adventure ‘Three Kings’ (1999) – and now Russell has turned his mind to no lesser topic than the meaning of life itself, and the result is the relentlessly off-the-wall ‘I ♥ Huckabees’, a deep plunge into the shallow end of existence, and a film whose quirky intelligence establishes him, along with Charlie Kaufman and Paul Thomas Anderson, as one of the most inventive writers working in cinema today.

At a time when idealistic young environmental activist and poet Albert Markovski (Jason ‘Rushmore’ Schwartzman) is at a crossroads in his life, he encounters the same mysterious African man (Ger Duany) on three separate occasions. Troubled by the coincidence and what it might (or might not) signify, he employs the metaphysical services of Bernard and Vivian Jaffe (Dustin Hoffman, Lily Tomlin), ‘existential detectives’ whose card Albert had found in the pocket of a jacket which he borrowed for a meeting with Brad Stand (Jude Law), an ambitious and unscrupulous executive at the superstore Huckabees who is hijacking Albert’s Open Spaces Coalition as part of a cynical ploy to make Huckabees – and himself – look good. The couple are convinced that Brad is at the heart of Albert’s existential crisis, and to help reinstate Albert’s ‘connection’ they buddy him up with another of their clients, Tommy Corn (Mark Wahlberg), an earnest fireman who has become convinced in the wake of 9/11 that all his own, and indeed the world’s, problems stem from the use of petroleum and America’s exploitation of the third world. Soon Albert’s nemesis Brad is also turning to the detectives, and although his motive is only to undermine Albert further, Brad and his girlfriend, Huckabees’ model Dawn Campbell (Naomi Watts), turn out to have genuine existential problems of their own. Meanwhile Albert and Tommy, dissatisfied with the Jaffes’ holistic theories of the interconnectedness of all things, decide to “go over to the other side” and consult the detectives’ arch-rival Caterine Vauban (Isabelle Huppert), a French nihilist who is not afraid to get down and dirty in the face of life’s cruel absurdities. And that is when things start to get really confusing.

‘I ♥ Huckabees’ is a philosophical mystery-comedy about just how crucially important and thoroughly inconsequential human existence is, and this paradoxical content is very much matched by its form. For it is a story in which nothing very much happens, but in a hilariously complicated way which seems strange and magical; and for all its madcap whimsy, the film still manages to pack a much more powerful intellectual and moral punch than, say, your average Hollywood blockbuster. ‘I ♥ Huckabees’ seems destined to divide its viewers along the lines of the two worldviews it seeks to dramatise and reconcile – some will be dazzled by the profound meaningfulness of everything in it, while others will fail to see any point to it at all – but either way, everyone can laugh at its bizarre lines and absurd situations, marvel at the performances from its extraordinary ensemble cast, and thrill at its breathless juggling of multiple storylines which may (or may not) all be connected. And in that way, this film is not a little like life itself.