There are movies that are made to allow the audience to escape from their lives, and enjoy a few hours of just watching things blow up every few seconds. I Heart Huckabees is not one of those movies.
Huckabees makes you think, and think hard. The movie’s main characters are Albert Markovski (Jason Schwartzman), an ecological crusader, Bernard (Dustin Hoffman) and Vivian Jaffe (Lily Tomlin), a married couple of existential detectives, Brad Stand (Jude Law), a sales vice president for the Huckabees store, Tommy Corn (Mark Wahlberg), Markovski’s philosophical “other,” and several more.
The work of the Jaffe couple is the most philosophically interesting part of the movie. As existential detectives, they probe and snoop into every detail of their clients’ lives, working on the philosophy that everything is connected and nothing doesn’t matter. As Vivian Jaffe explains it to Markovski, “There’s nothing too small. You know when police find the slightest bit of DNA and build a case on it, if we might see you floss or masturbate that could be the key to your entire reality.”
Markovski and Corn, in addition to following the Jaffe technique, later become drawn to the nihilism of a competing detective, Catarine Vauban (Isabelle Huppert). The two men, who complement each other philosophically, find success in Vauban’s teachings and in the end realize that both ideas must come together to describe how life really works.
Huckabees is not all long-haired philosophy; much of the movie is very funny. The dialogue is well-written and some of the situations the characters find themselves in are exaggerated to the point of absurdity.
In addition, the expertise of actors like Tomlin and Hoffman add a lot of energy to the movie. Tomlin and Hoffman are masters of their craft, and were excellent as the two detectives, adding just the right amount of tongue-in-cheek silliness to their characters.
The auxiliary material of the movie is also impressive. Fox established several websites for the characters and organizations in the story, such as http://www.jaffeandjaffe.com/, the website of the two existential detectives, which details their methods, philosophy, and case studies, and even offers a quiz to start off your own analysis.
Also, http://www.huckabees.com/ is the website of the store that lends its name to the title of the film. The site is riddled with the “community values” philosophy the store supposedly works for, as well as information about the Open Spaces Coalition, which is what unites Markovski and Stand.
The cinematography is nothing special, although there are a few computer-aided graphics that illustrate some of the existential points. The real strength of I Heart Huckabees is the characters.
The audience gets to watch as Markovski, Corn, Stand, and Stand’s girlfriend Dawn Campbell (Naomi Watts) are “dismantled”—the term the detectives use to mean uncovering the hidden connections behind someone’s life, a process which often has profound psychological consequences for the client—and reassemble themselves.
For one who has lately been losing faith in America’s film industry, Huckabees is a light at the end of the tunnel. It shows that there are still people who can inject true creativity and thought into a piece of cinema.
