I Heart Huckabees

Touted as an 'existential comedy', when in fact it's a comedy about existentialism, I Heart Huckabees begins with an environmental activist, Albert (Schwartzman), engaging the services of 'existential detectives' (Hoffman and Tomlin) to investigate a series of apparently random coincidences in his life. Their investigations lead them to Brad (Law), a PR executive for Huckabees, the 'Everything Store', who appears to be hijacking Albert's plans to save a local marsh. Given that everything is connected in a Buddhist-style universe (according to Hoffman's musings), it's not long before a whole range of off-beat characters move into view, among them fireman Wahlberg, Isabelle Huppert as a rival philosopher to Hoffman and Tomlin, and Naomi Watts as Brad's girlfriend and the face of Huckabees.

Think of it as Magnolia or Short Cuts as scripted by Albert Camus, with jokes. David O. Russell (Three Kings) has constructed a cerebral comedy about the meaning(lessness) of life that is very clever indeed, and he has extracted maximum value from an excellent cast; Wahlberg in particular is very funny as the environmentally aware fireman who cycles to fires. The trouble with I Heart Huckabees, however, is that it may be too clever for its own good, or at least too clever to appeal to Omniplex fodder, although Russell seems acutely aware of this: 'Most people,' as Hoffman observes, 'prefer to remain on the surface of things.' The irony is that the 'message' (delivered in a hilarious two-hander between Schwartzman and Wahlberg) purports to be that the point of existence is to stop thinking, to achieve the 'pure being' of being 'free as a dish of mould'. Be advised that such offerings, as with I Heart Huckabees as a whole, should be taken with a Siberian mine's worth of salt. Challenging, thought-provoking, funny and well acted, I Heart Huckabees is a rare Hollywood film.