I ♥ Huckabees (2004)

I ♥ Huckabees (2004)

November 06, 2004

AMC Fenway Theater, Boston, MA

½ / ****

By Scott Muoio

Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah fuckabees.

The above is my best summation of the on-screen inaction in the biggest mish mash of nonsensical existential blowhardiness I have seen this year. Jason Schwartzman, Jude Law, Dustin Hoffman, Lily Tomlin, Isabelle Huppert, and Naomi Watts are completely wasted in this movie as they play a mental tug of war with one another for the purpose of, well, if only I could answer that one, maybe this movie wouldn’t have been quite so dull and utterly so appalling. But alas, all 106 minutes are spent by our players supposedly getting to the cruxt of individual existence as it relates to the greater world and universe around us. In the end, we are told by Hoffman’s existential detective Bernard Jaffe that perhaps our cases are never closed. Uh huh. OK. Then why put us through the agony of a bunch of sketch comedy that falls flat and a nonexistent plot all the while teasing some sort of enlightenment for both the struggling characters and the confused audience? Well, perhaps we should take that up with Director and Co-Writer David O. Russell. Or better yet, perhaps we should just forget about this misinformed rubbish all together.

The plot: Schwartzman’s Albert Markovski is a tree hugging activist bent on saving “the marsh” from the unstoppable juggernaut that is the Huckabees retail outlet (think Wal-Mart with a hot spokesgal). He enlists the existential detectives for the purpose of unlocking the mystery of three coincidental encounters he has had with a 7 foot African doorman. But what they give him is much, much more.

Moving on… Jude Law is Brad Stand, a superstar Huckabees sales exec who plays both sides of the fence in order to lull his opposition into a false sense of security so that he can continue his plight up the Huckabees corporate ladder. If that involves the demolition of the marsh, well then, so be it. Hoffman and Tomlin are the Jaffes, self-proclaimed existential detectives who take on cases that defy the goals of psychiatry and aim at a larger purpose. Their mantra: everything in the universe is connected. Once they get Albert to sign on their dotted line, they stop at nothing to penetrate every crevasse of his topsy-turvey existence.

Moving on further… Naomi Watts is Dawn, the All-American spokesgal for Huckabees and girlfriend to Brad. She is going through her own set of issues relating to her beauty and the struggle to maintain it at the cost of being herself. The Jaffes, of course, bring all this to the surface.

Moving on to parts really unknown… Isabelle Hubbert is the French ingénue Caterine, a fallen detective and former pupil of the Jaffes who is now spewing the opposite rhetoric: pain and discontent are our lives and everything is disconnected. Last, and definitely not least, is Mark Walhberg, who does a fine job making us laugh as Tom Corn, the thinking man’s naïve Neanderthal. Tom fights fires by day and struggles with America’s reliance on petroleum all the time going as far as to ride his bike alongside the firetruck because he doesn’t believe in ever using petroleum. Clearly, Wahlberg gets all the jokes that are funny and delivers in spades because, well, his character is the same one he played in Boogie Nights, Three Kings, and Planet of the Apes; albeit, the latter was unintentionally funny. If Three Kings was Dirk Diggler in the Army, than Huckabees is Dirk Diggler saves the Rainforests. But it works, and that’s saying something in a film where most things do not.

If this plot jumble sounds entertaining on the surface, don’t be fooled. The premise is certainly there for something that could take off and be quite entertaining and the actors definitely seem up to it, going all out and full speed ahead in their performances. But Russell’s execution is completely lost on me. For all the talking, little is being said, and if you stop and think about it, little actually happens in this movie. The jokes that do work are generally in the visuals, not the dialogue. Wahlberg waters the lawn with his firehose as the rest of his company battles a blaze. That’s funny. The detectives leap into the back of a woman’s car as she happily and seriously sucks the ice cream out of her sugar cone. That’s funny. Albert runs through the labyrinthine-like maze of corridors leading to the Jaffe’s office for the purpose of unlocking his confusion. That’s clever. 106 minutes of philosophy 101 buzz words flying a mile a minute; well, that’s just the sort of thing one might use to get to sleep at night. If perhaps Russell had stuck to the first rule of filmmaking, show don’t tell, instead of some non-existent rule of philosophy he seems to have created on the spot, the more you say the better chance you have of saying something, then this film could have been a success. As it is, I find it unequivocally a turkey if ever there was one. High aims do not necessarily yield exceptional results. Herein lies People’s Exhibit A to that particular theory.