MOVIE REVIEW: I HEART HUCKABEES (7 OUT OF 10)

I Heart Huckabees is about as perplexing as they come, and trying to explain everything that went on in this movie would be a lost cause. Basically, Albert (Jason Schwartzman) is having a serious belief crisis about his job as a conservationist so he seeks out the Existential Detectives (Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin) who delve into his life and discover a bitter feud between Albert and an up-and-coming Huckabees department store representative (Jude Law) who takes over Albert’s conservation coalition to use it for Huckabees’ own interests. Throw in Tommy (Mark Wahlberg) as another client of the Existential Detectives, Dawn (Naomi Watts) as Huckabees’ beautiful young spokesmodel, and Caterine Vauban (Isabelle Huppert) as a renegade detective attempting to align Albert and Tommy with her beliefs, and in the end you get a mess of events that ultimately leads to each person finding their own way and learning something about themselves.

Besides the plot being a mouthful, the entire movie is filled with existential mumbo-jumbo, elevated talks of philosophy and non-stop belief-system jargon. Huckabees is a lot to take in and probably requires a couple of viewings to get a good grip on. While the dialogue of this movie may have been abstract and unnecessarily heady, the overall plot of the film was entertaining and uplifting. It seems as if David O. Russell was trying to write this film with the complexity of a Charlie Kauffman script (Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine…) and the quirkiness of a Wes Anderson film (Rushmore, Royal Tenenbaums). I think Russell overstretched his limits with Huckabees, coming off the buzz of confidence he attained from receiving such high praises for his last film, 1999’s Three Kings. But in spite of this film being a bit full of itself, the cast is incredible and the movie is full of hilarious dialogue.

The brightest spot in Huckabees was the comical performance given by Mark Wahlberg. As Tommy Corn, Wahlberg played a paranoid fire fighter who had an adamant hate for petroleum. At one point in the film when a person tells him he is a hero for being a firefighter, Wahlberg responds, “I’m not a hero. We’d all be heroes if we stopped using petroleum.” Wahlberg’s comic timing is perfect throughout the film and he gets a majority of the funniest lines in Huckabees. This role was a blessing for a slumping Mark Wahlberg.

If you can sift through a good deal of the nonsensical existential discussions and push aside the hefty amount of hype that came along with this film, I think you will find I Heart Huckabees to be a rather funny and charming movie. I was definitely a little let down by David O. Russell’s fourth film, seeing as it had an incredible cast and a great deal of directorial promise, but the fact is that I Heart Huckabees is still a pretty good movie, and just because it may not have met the high expectations of snobbier moviegoers does not take away from its credibility as being a better-than-average film.