“I ♥ Huckabees” is one of a pleasingly, increasingly common series of cinematic anomalies. Director David O. Russell (“Three Kings”), in league with Charlie Kaufman, Wes Anderson and others, is creating a genre of big-budget, big-name films that, in spite of their grandiose production values, inspire thought.
They are an incestuous group, as stylistic similarities to “Being John Malkovich” (written by Kaufman and directed by “Three Kings'” actor Spike Jonze) are evident, and Jason Schwartzman plays a character in “Huckabees” whose presumptions and pretensions are not far removed from his role in Anderson’s “Rushmore.”
This is the generation of filmmakers that has learned from the independent film movement how to make interesting movies and has somehow managed to sell the notion that complicated films can be entertaining. Thus, they have landed the likes of George Clooney, Bill Murray, Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin to give major celebrity exposure to what might otherwise be strictly arthouse fare.
In “Huckabees,” Hoffman and Tomlin play existential detectives investigating angst and coincidence for clients such as Schwartzman’s Albert Markovski. The theme of universal interconnectedness hearkens to Douglas Adams’ novel, “Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency,” but rather than ground the existential in reality, “Huckabees” takes reality and warps it into surreal abstraction.
From their interaction with Albert, we are led through the detectives’ web of confusing, pseudo-spiritual claptrap, tying together obscure relationships between Albert, his nemesis (Jude Law) and others of the detectives’ clients, including a surprising, angry and self-righteous Mark Wahlberg, another veteran of Russell’s “Three Kings.”
There is an internal struggle in the film between two opposing philosophical views. That same duality affects the viewer, asking not only which side makes more or less sense, but also whether to take any of it seriously at all.
What resolution emerges is tenuous, as it should be. The movie avoids a certain amount of self-importance through the abstraction of the characters. There are no simple answers. The movie’s main failing is that it makes no conclusive argument, but then it is clear that real conclusiveness would be the ultimate arrogance.
Throughout the movie the surreal elements, though not subtle, remain detached enough for us to consider each character as not another deliberately abstract, artsy kind of modern-film stereotype, but rather as an archetype or metaphor for some particular philosophical concept or ideology. It stops short of illustrating these metaphors too precisely, but may then suffer from a sort of elitist pedanticism.
If a viewer wishes to take the film very seriously, he or she may feel insulted or let down. If taken casually, however, it is all the more thought provoking.
As the credits role, one may ask: Was it pretentious, satirical or actually sincerely, deep and meaningful? It might even be all of those. It doesn’t matter; it is the fact that we are made to think and to ask these questions that makes “I ♥ Huckabees” a valuable film.
Grade: B
