Film

Unifying Theories

'I ♥ Huckabees' Marries Philosophy to Farce

by Sean Nelson

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I ? HUCKABEES Like being on mushrooms, not acid.

The notion that the universe can be contained within a single grand unifying theory is mainly the province of scientists and stoners. In the case of I ♥ Huckabees, the ambitious new film by the great David O. Russell (Three Kings, Flirting with Disaster), it's also the province of an artist who has so much energy and passion for the realm of ideas that he doesn't quite seem to recognize when his movie starts slipping away from him. Either that, or he doesn't care.

While there are many characters, themes, plots, and subplots in Huckabees, the real conflicts are all dialectical--existential detectives vs. nihilist temptress, surrealistic idealist vs. empirical purist, etc. And even though these precepts are embodied by famous actors (Dustin Hoffman, Lily Tomlin, Isabelle Huppert, Jason Schwartzman, Mark Wahlberg), the entire film winds up feeling like an abstraction, rather than a dramatization, of a philosophical quandary. That doesn't mean Huckabees fails to entertain; it just means that the viewer is required to discern a pattern from a seemingly random blizzard of ideas blowing across the screen. Somewhere within that randomness lies a deep Zen belly laugh of a movie, but the laugh isn't free.

Schwartzman plays Albert, a young idealist/activist/poet who hires a pair of existential detectives (Tomlin and Hoffman) to help him investigate his life after experiencing a set of irreconcilable coincidences that follow his unlikely association with Huckabees, a Wal-Martian department store that contains not only every product or lifestyle a consumer could ever want to buy, but every shallow fallacy a consumer society can contain, which makes it a convenient symbol. (Too convenient, you might say.) The public face of Huckabees is Brad (Jude Law), the obvious opposite of everything Albert believes, and his spokesmodel wife, Dawn (Naomi Watts), who, despite her obvious vacuity, Albert really wants to have sex with. Add into this mix a sexy French nihilist, a despairing firefighter, and an eight-foot-tall Sudanese orphan and you have all the ingredients for a screwball comedy. But Russell resists the formal design of genre, much as he rejects any single philosophy, opting instead to embrace the reality in which all ideas coexist and collide with equal and opposite severity, much like all these characters interact both with one another, and with themselves. It sounds confusing because it is.

A lot of difficult-to-explain artifacts of pop culture get characterized as being like some other thing, "on acid." And while it's tempting to regard the film along these lines--it certainly is difficult to explain--LSD is the wrong model. I ♥ Huckabees is a mushroom trip, characterized by discursive logic, warm colors, and a torrential disgorgement of ideas you could only call psychedelic. And as with a mushroom trip, every idea the film advances seems not only reasonable, but downright profound. "There is no remainder in the mathematics of infinity," says Hoffman early in the film, offering the first of many resonant koans. "Why do people only ask themselves deep questions when they're in trouble?" "What happens in the meadow at dusk?" "How am I not myself?" And onward. The film is driven by the relentless positing of unanswerable questions, set against the catchall artifice of the Huckabees store. The quest feels organic (again, mushrooms, as opposed to acid's synthetic chemical aftertaste), but when the credits roll, the answers are as elusive as ever; like every drug trip, the best revelations are forgotten as quickly as they come, and all you remember are images, like Schwartzman and Wahlberg bashing each other's faces with a big rubber ball to experience pure being.

Serious philosophy and popular film have always made an uneasy marriage. Typically, the more explicit the script's allegiance to philosophical inquiry, the less general interest the film holds. It's true in Huckabees, too; the narrative falters when you feel the characters' behaviors being forced into academic references. (The other extreme is the name-drop style of pseudo-intellectual filmmakers like Woody Allen.) A more interesting commonality of such films is their tendency toward bleakness. Consider Godard's Weekend, a torturous font of despair and misanthropy that marked the beginning of the great filmmaker's sharp decline into irrelevance. By contrast, I ♥ Huckabees swells with life-affirming optimism; in a sense, it's the cinematic reciprocal of Godard's hateful dirge (they even share a color scheme, sort of). If both films are about the arbitrary nature of subjective perception, the choice every thinking person must make between hope and hopelessness, it's clear that Russell is invested in the former option. That automatically gives his film, for all its discombobulated overreaching, a metaphysical leg up. After all, nihilism is for teenagers. People who "only ask themselves deep questions when they're in trouble" are predisposed to negative answers. The rest of us have to live for the question.