Back in the day, they used to call movies like I Heart Huckabees "head films." Think high-minded, loosely structured larks like The Magic Christian or O Lucky Man.
These days, you'd call them "Huh?"
Imagine a movie larded with deft wordplay and every whimsical, groovy thought that popped into the mind of its creator. What you end up with is a mess of ideas and silly asides, but one that for some of us is an intelligent pleasure to wade through. For others, perhaps, not so much.
The movie opens with Albert (Jason Schwartzman), an environmental activist and poet desperately trying to move the masses (okay, the handful) with his ode to a rock ( You rock, rock!"). We soon discover that Albert is a deposed activist, his save-the-wetlands project having been taken over by a crass marketer named Brad (Jude Law) on behalf of the Huckabees corporation. Brad's campaign comes complete with hilariously cheesy pictures of celeb sponsor Shania Twain (it's surprising that she shows up for a cameo in a movie so unflattering).
Add to that the mysterious coincidence of repeated encounters with the same seven-foot-tall Sudanese man, and it's no wonder a perplexed Albert finds himself drawn to "existential detectives" Bernard and Vivian (Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin) to make sense of his life.
Sample interview question: Vivian: "Have you ever transcended space and time?" -- Albert: "Uh, time, not space. Um ... no, I don't know what you're talking about."
What follows is a chaotic mix, as "clients" encounter each other. Albert's consciousness "buddy" is Tommy (Mark Wahlberg), a hot-tempered firefighter with a petroleum obsession. Eventually Brad and his girlfriend Dawn (Naomi Watts), a Huckabees poster girl, also join and end up suffering existential breakdowns as the shallowness of their existences comes clear.
Darkening the karma is the "heavy," Caterine Vauban (Isabelle Huppert), a competitor and former accolyte of B&V who tempts away their clientele. Where the detectives operate on an all-inclusive view of the universe ("There is no such thing as you and me," Bernard says, "there is no remainder in the mathematics of infinity"), Vauban's is a tough-love chaos-centric "nothing matters" quick fix.
She may have a point. I Heart Huckabees is pretty loose for a movie that posits that everything is connected (complete with psychedelic FX that appear every so often as Bernard speaks).
But the dialogue is a real treat, as is the acting. Schwartzman, Wahlberg and Watts all shine. But the tour de force is from Law, whose character is pure exuberant plastic at the outset and whose eventual breakdown is soul-deep (at one point, he vomits into his hand at a business meeting).
Smart, without being crushingly serious, funny without guffaws, I Heart Huckabees is a rare bird to find in a theatre these days. If you don't come out feeling more centred, you should at least feel you haven't been talked down to.
(This film is rated 14-A)
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