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Review: 'I (Heart) Huckabees' tries too hard
« on: Oct 1st, 2004, 7:52pm » |
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Review: 'I (Heart) Huckabees' tries too hard
By Christy Lemire
Associated Press
Friday, October 1, 2004 Posted: 1:05 PM EDT (1705 GMT)
(AP) -- I wanted to (heart) "I (Heart) Huckabees." Really, I did.
Great cast, fun trailer, wildly inventive idea.
But the repetitive philosophical mumbo-jumbo in David O. Russell's talky new movie feels regurgitated without the benefit of even having been chewed up a little.
You'll want to (heart) it, too -- for its energy and unpredictability, if nothing else. Ultimately, though, despite its ambitions, the film is a dizzying failure. It is simply trying too hard to be weird.
Just to give you an idea, Jason Schwartzman plays angst-ridden environmentalist Albert Markovski, who plants trees in the middle of parking lots and pens poems about rocks. ("You rock, rock," is one of his original lines.)
After running into the same tall African man three times, he believes this cannot be a meaningless coincidence, so he hires a husband-and-wife team of "existential detectives," Bernard and Vivian Jaffe (a brilliantly madcap Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin), to probe his life for meaning.
"Have you ever transcended space and time?" Vivian asks in his initial interview.
"Yes. No," he answers. "Space, not time."
After scurrying around after Albert and monitoring his habits for a few days, they discover his conflict with Brad Stand (Jude Law), a slick, pretty-boy sales exec at the Huckabees retail chain, who's competing with him for control of a coalition that's trying to preserve a marsh.
The seemingly perfect, blonde Brad, whose girlfriend is Huckabees' seemingly perfect, blond spokesmodel, Dawn (Naomi Watts), appears to Albert in visions in which he hacks him up with a machete. Bernard tries to explain, using a blanket, that everything and everyone is the same and connected, even Albert and Brad.
"There is no such thing as you and me," Bernard says. "There is no remainder in the mathematics of infinity."
And it seems that Russell, who co-wrote the script with Jeff Baena, takes this babble seriously, because he presents a counterpoint in form of French philosopher Caterine Vauban (Isabelle Huppert) who teaches that nothing is connected and everything is meaningless.
Caught in the middle of these two approaches are Albert and his "other," Tommy Corn (Mark Wahlberg), a firefighter who's similarly seeking the answers to life's mysteries. Wahlberg, whom Russell directed in his powerful 1999 war satire "Three Kings," is surprisingly funny and isn't afraid to get a little goofy, something we've never seen from him before -- not even during his Marky Mark days.
Ironically, the moments when Russell veers toward reality are the film's most powerful. One scene in particular stands out in which Albert is forced to confront his mother (Talia Shire) about the way she handled his cat's death when he was a boy. Shire's presence is formidable -- and it adds an extra layer of interest that she really is Schwartzman's mother -- but what makes it work is the ring of truth to the dialogue, which is notably missing elsewhere.
But then it's back to a debate with the existential detectives about particles and cubes, which appear on screen and float around a bit, as well as the empty spaces between those particles and cubes.
At that point, you have to just throw up your hands in frustration at the realization that the film is just one giant gimmick -- heavy-handed while at the same time, failing to make a dent.
"I (Heart) Huckabees," a Fox Searchlight Pictures release, is rated R for language and a sex scene.
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Copyright 2004 The Associated Press.
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