He hearts Huckabees, too

Jude Law and Jason Schwartzmann in I Heart Huckabees

10 April 2012

A critic should always allow for the indigestion factor when making any kind of judgment. Put simply, given a severe attack of heartburn even the most sublime of aesthetic experiences can leave you burping and flatulent.

On the morning I saw I Huckabees, I was in about as bad a mood as is possible, and the last balm I required for my grazed psyche was a screwball comedy taking on philosophical themes with a dewy adolescent eye. Nevertheless, it diverted and even amused me, so, factoring out the indigestion, I can only conclude that this must be a very funny film, indeed.

David O Russell, who made the irreverent Three Kings - the only film to come out of the 1991 Gulf War with any semblance of honesty, has struck out for the far side of reality with this wacky tale of a neurotic environmentalist in search of the meaning of life.

Jason Schwartzman plays Albert Markovitz, doe of eye, dark of hair, and given to writing dreadful poetry. "You rock... rock," he serenades a boulder in a marsh that he and his fellow campaigners at The Open Space Coalition are trying to save from development.

The baddies are a supermarket chain - the Huckabees of the title - and their rising star, Brad Stand (Jude Law), is infiltrating the group with a view to neutering it and ousting Markovitz. This is bad

enough, but Markovitz is as much preoccupied by a string of strange coincidences involving a lissom Sudanese, so he consults a pair of " existential detectives", Bernard and Vivian Jaffe (Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin), with the aim of finding out what it's all about.

The Jaffes' method consists of peculiar little philosophic lectures and fol lowing Markovitz everywhere he goes, armed with camera and notebook. As Vivian remarks: "The way you floss or masturbate may be the key to your existence." But, really, the Jaffes view the key to existence as lying in relativity: everyone is connected by space and time, no man is an island.

They aim to persuade their clients to cross into a realm of unfettered inter-subjectivity, and team Markovitz up as "the other" to Tommy (Mark Wahlberg), a fireman who has a revulsion for petroleum (he cycles to blazes).

Stand and his girlfriend, Dawn (Naomi Watts), a model who is the "face and voice" of Huckabees, become looped into the strange trajectory of the Jaffes. Brad is only pretending, but Dawn rejects her pretty image and ends up "looking like an Amish bag lady".

However, the Jaffes' fundamentally benign form of extreme therapy is under threat from the steely Caterine-Vauban (Isabelle Huppert), a former associate who has embraced the dark existentialism of Nietschze. For her, all existence is suffering and pain - a truth she demonstrates to Tommy by abandoning him, and having sex with Markovitz in the very marsh he is trying to save.

If this synopsis sounds bewildering and strained, then it's not a reflection of the film, which moves with a confident pace through the muddy realms of metaphysics. Filmed in the anonymous backwaters of Los Angeles, cinematographer Peter Deming (who also shot David Lynch's Mulholland Drive) and produc t ion designer KK Barrett ( Adaptation), have created a distinctive, bleached vision for I Huckabees. Colours are primary - if not simply black and white - buildings are utilitarian, artefacts generic. In opposition to this antistyle there are surrealistic interludes where the characters are plunged into the visual analog of their confused mental states: faces are chopped up into automatically recombining snapshots; 2-D landscapes are juxtaposed with 3-D objects; characters zip through the void on jet skis. The cue for these effects is Bernard Jaffe's own "spirit guide" Magritte - perhaps the least demanding of the Surrealists - and while superficially I Huckabees is a deranging experience, it ends up being deeply reassuring.

Reassuring, as well, is the ensemble cast. Schwartzman as Markovitz is the archetypal repressed boy-man, stumbling through life armed with good intentions and not much else. It's nice to see Hoffman playing comedy, with his rumpled face and hair; he and Tomlin are cutely believable as suburban seers.

ISABELLE Huppert exudes more sexuality with a hangnail than most of us do with our entire body, even if her character is the most stereotypical. Jude Law's sexuality, for once, isn't in the frame. Instead, he brings to Brad Stand a coiled bumptiousness which springs forth into hysteria.

But if there is a stand-out performance, it's that of Mark Wahlberg, whose confusion in the face of chaos and phobic response to a world crazed with its own sense of power convey the genuine feel of a soul in torment. He truly is the "other" to Schwartzman: raw, impulsive, with comic timing well in front of the beat.

I say I Huckabees is reassuring because, while it toys with deep questions, the answers it digs up are good old-fashioned therapy-speak ones: unhappy childhoods make you unhappy; everyone needs a good friend; everyone needs to have marshy sex now and then; a consumer lifestyle will bring you no lasting content; environmentalism is a good idea.

Put like this, there's nothing very inspiring about this trespass on to the mundane, magical-realist territory inhabited by Spike Jonze and the Kaufman brothers, but if I were a dewy-eyed adolescent with a streak of weltschmerz I'd find it altogether beguiling.

I Heart Huckabees
Cert: cert15

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