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Director: David O. Russell
Screenplay: Jeff Baena and David
O. Russell
Cast: Dustin Hoffman as Bernard
Jaffe; Isabelle Huppert as Caterine Vauban; Jude Law as Brad Stand; Jason
Schwartzman as Albert Markovski; Lily Tomlin as Vivian Jaffe; Mark Wahlberg as
Tommy Corn; Naomi Watts as Dawn Campbell; Ger Duany as Stephen Nimieri; Isla
Fisher as Heather
[Spoilers Throughout]
David O. Russell has called Huckabees
his least favourite film to make, stating it as his mid life crisis work that
became arduous1. It didn't help, adding an infamy to his career,
there was a certain behind the scenes moment on this production, recorded and
made available online, where he had a meltdown and screamed at actress Lily Tomlin, marking him in cinema with
a tarnish even though he became an acclaimed director of Oscar nominated films
into the 2010s. It's a shame as, even if its philosophy for dummies, I Heart Huckabees perfectly fits into
my interest in those projects doomed to fail at the box office, yet nonetheless
be commissioned by major Hollywood Studios. Admittedly in this case, this was a
Fox Searchlight Pictures production,
a subsidiary that has made its career producing major gambles, even the likes
of Terence Malick's The Tree of Life (2011), so this isn't necessarily
the biggest gamble for them among very idiosyncratic productions over their
careers, but in this particular case we have one of my growing obsessions of
the idiosyncratic film in a popular or recognised director's career, the kind
that can be maligned or even viewed as disasters in their career but prove to
be the most rewarding for me. The context is also pertinent as the last film
before this for Russell was Three Kings (1999), his breakthrough
film, to which the elevator pitch for Huckabees
must've been really good to get this funny peculiar comedy produced even by the
people who'd wait patiently for Malick
to make something.
Immediately after the company
logos, a string of obscenities, spoken in panicked anxious internal monologue,
fill our ears as environmental campaigner Albert Markovski (Jason Schwartzman)
presides over the fruits of their last campaign, a mere rock protected whilst
everything in a woodland environment is still in lieu to be concreted over. An awkward,
childish poem of his about that rock rocking is merely a prelude to his awkward
life where he has been made uncomfortable by a series of coincidences bumping
into the same stranger repeatedly. Coincidence, wearing someone else's jacket,
as if this is a Gustav Meyrink novel
where someone falls into a surreal adventure accidentally wearing another man's
hat, leads him to "existential detectives" Bernard and Vivian Jaffe (Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin), who take him on a metaphorical journey between
humanitarian philosophy, where Bernard argues all life is connected using a
very large white blanket, and nihilistic philosophy when a breakaway European
philosopher Caterine Vauban (Isabelle
Huppert) comes into play with full stereotyping of the kind of French
intellectualism painted through the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre. And it's meant to be funny.
Whilst it'd take 2008 to fully
immerse myself into being a cineaste, I grew up in the early 2000s and I can
attest to this bubble period, which Fox
Searchlight Pictures was a major contributor to, of very idiosyncratic
off-brand studio productions, controversially called "indies" despite
the fact they weren't exactly produced by independents and can have named
stars. These films, really from the late nineties, even 1999 when you have the
likes of Being John Malkovich, and
headed by Spike Jonze and French
director Michel Gondry, started to
become very popular or at least prolific, enough that they were a staple in the
burgeoning DVD rental stores from around the same year Huckabees was released where video was cancelled in my country. The
immediate thing with these films is that a lot of them are very mainstream -
this having the same zippy pace and production quality of a lot of mainstream
Hollywood films, from the quick simple story to shots clearly taken with
stand-ins for the famous actors when they weren't available - but in hindsight Huckabees is strange due to the fact it's
trying to milk comedy from existential philosophy. Why it lingers in my mind
rather than becoming one of the many disposable films in this era that'd appear
on rental and retail DVD is that, whilst it does zip along, it's all
surrounding material even dialogue and ideas even simplified you're forced to
absorb.
It helps the film is as bright
and paradoxically profane as it is. Jon Brion's score, also scoring Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in a perfect symbolism of
these type of eccentric American films just being released together in 2004, is
whimsical and full of pep, and the visuals are as appropriately bright for a
film where the titular Huckabees is a bloated, flashy hypermarket chain that
sells everything. Cut out and stop motion animation, intentionally childish, is
used to orchestrate absurd images especially whenever Markovski or use
Bernard's meditation techniques, the kind of illustrative scenes in their bold
colours which were pretty common at this time and influenced by the playfulness
Gondry and Jonze together were bringing to their films. Yet with mind to Russell's origins in darker minded
films, just Three Kings by itself a
cynical war film dealing with the USA's conflicts in the Middle East, but with
moral centre, its befitting his views are much more meaner, be it Markovski
constantly taking a metaphorical machete to his imagined phantoms, especially
Brad Stand (Jude Law), a member of
the Huckabees corporation deliberately becoming part of his environmental
group, and hiring the existential detectives, just to boot Markovski out and
gain capital in his own company.
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Again, the package itself is the kind of film that would've sold in this time, what with the surprising success that'd appear when films like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind became successful. Probably the bigger issue is that, returning to the first paragraph wasn't that the premise of this film was weird at the time, but that American middle-budgeted cinema is so less common and safer that I Heart Huckabees is a much odder production to sign off on, especially as Fox Searchlight Pictures is owned by Disney now. Nowadays the elevator pitch would raise eyebrows unless they were talking about It is, but again that elevator pitch must've come off with some raised eyebrows unless they were talking about Mark Wahlberg as Tommy Corn, a depressed, petroleum obsessed fireman who is put together with Markovski in a buddy system.
I think notably, if you want to distil
the experience of the film in the best aspect of the production, your
appreciation will depend on whether Wahlberg's
character and performance works or not as it feels the centre of this premise,
a depressed fireman which Wahlberg steals
the film with who, implied to have been there at Ground Zero on 9/11, has
developed a paranoia against the environmental and political damage petroleum
has caused, cycling to fires on a bike, which proves an advantage later on, and
telling his youngest daughter her mother's shoes are make by starving
Indonesian children going blind in dankly lit sweatshops, whilst drifting in nihilistic
philosophy. The former head of Marky Mark
and the Funky Bunch is far more interest playing a vulnerable male archetype
than he is the cool action lead, always coming off with an absurdity in even a Peter Berg film as, rather than the
eighties action star film makers still try to create or the gritty post-9/11
action films we also get, he's always come off as the everyman, literally a guy
in Boston in Massachusetts who just pumps iron a lot and can defend himself in
a fight but is also lovably a dolt and vulnerable, something with his uncombed
hair and hangdog eyes David O. Russell exploits perfectly in this film. Even if the
philosophy is simplistic, there's a quirky humanity that (in spite of Russell's
infamous outburst to Lily Tomlin) is
ultimately sweet for all the anger and profanity within the film, advantage
taken in having chosen actors like Wahlberg
whose persona and character in dialogue is going to look befuddled at Dustin Hoffman, grey mop of hair and
eccentric professor personality, about his theories of interconnectivity but,
as the character says, still wants to argue with him out of legitimate
interest.
A large part of the film's
greatest joys is just Wahlberg and Jason Schwartzman's major plot of
becoming BBFs, ultimately the crux of the film as the later, in his constantly
dodging of Brad Stand, is forced to confront their tether connecting them, even
if it's through pain as Markovski set Stand's jet ski on fire and the flames
accidentally spread over his home. The pair of charming together, contrasting Schwartzman playing an absolute bundle
of neurosis un-helped by his egotistic, middle class parents and shit position
in the midst of Stand trying a coup on him, with Wahlberg playing a figure who has a bad hair trigger temper but is
ultimately a giant soft hearted fireman who has developed growing environmental
concerns, likely from a PTSD scenario implied, and existential fears. It's also
a fascinating cast beyond this, though interestingly Hoffman and Tomlin really
do come off as those who stay the most off to the side, strangely befitting as
their romantic life as a couple is strong and their work even allows them,
monitoring their daily life, to take in bathroom breaks and sex lives.
Law, his American accent non-descript but befitting his role as an
empty superstore conglomerate who is actually selling the woodland the
environmental group wants to protect to be constructed over, has an interesting
route where as the stereotypical bad suit actually has an existential crisis
due to his belief he could just wrap the existential detectives around his
finger; a anecdote about Shana Twain, which does lead to her having a cameo
beyond a vapid cardboard cut-out and plays off her real vegetarianism, is
literally all the personality he has as its revealed, leading to the suit
having the kind of existential crisis that Talking
Heads wrote the perfect lyrics of in Once
in a Lifetime. In danger of being maligned but thankfully having still a
strong role is Naomi Watts, a very underappreciated actress, as Stands'
girlfriend Dawn Campbell; the face of Huckabees as their main model for
promotional videos and images, her boyfriend's whim to hire the existential
crisis inadvertently raises their empty relationship and her own fears she is
merely a pretty face, something that even if it involved dressing as "an
Amish bag lady", does lead to Watts
showing her own sweet comic timing and a happy ending for Campbell when a
certain fireman crosses into her life and loves the bonnet she wears.
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Finally, there's Isabelle Huppert as Caterine Vauban, who proves the most unconventional and fascinating casting decision, not because of the character who is clearly a parody of French existentialism as she brings together Corn and Markovski into a rival philosophy of nihilism whilst creating friction in developing a sexual relationship with the later. No, it's that with the exception of two voice roles in Wes Anderson's animated films, Huppert has barely crossed the ocean to star in American films, the only real exception the notorious Heaven's Gate (1980), Michael Cimino's notorious box office, making the twenty four year delay like an alien from an entirely different type of cinema, European filmmaking, suddenly appearing and bringing her own incredible star power from a different state of reality. The clothed sex scene with her and Schwartzman dunking each other in a muddy pool is the least transgressive thing in a career including posing nude by a farm animal in Jean-Luc Godard's Every Man For Himself (1980) or Paul Verhoeven's Elle (2014), but the fact she shares scenes with Hoffman and Mark Wahlberg is still bizarre to say the least, probably more so now as she's stayed in Europe for most her career and someone like Wahlberg became a main star in the Transformers films.
The potentially difficulty with
the philosophy being thrown about is belied by the fact the film does have
these absurd characters to pin them to even if broad facsimiles - Huppert also dead pan in her views
whilst Hoffman and Tomlin almost play new age
existentialists, Jude Law the
perfectly shallow business man who accidentally gets pushed into existentialism
through his vanity, or Watts getting
a nice journey of self discovery, and of course Schwartzman and Wahlberg
becoming BBFs where Markovski is eventually dissatisfied with both options in
front of him and finds, alongside all his psychological baggage, that he should
find a middle ground. All of it is framed in the type of "eccentric"
American film of the 2000s, a lot of the more stranger and inventive moments in
how Huckabees tried to visually
depict material. You do got the mortifying image of Jude Law breastfeeding Jason
Schwartzman with what appears to be prosthetic breasts,
even if Jude Law is an incredible
attractive man, but also a lot of funny and poignant moments. As mentioned, it's
all simple animation, but it also leads to one of the best scenes, the moment
where Corn does want to argue with Bernard about the latter's interconnection theory
with their faces the air in front of them constantly fragmenting into smaller
cubes in smaller cubes in smaller cubes to the point of molecular connection, a
very simplistic but perfect attempt at depicting this idea whilst being
playful.
Arguably only one scene, whilst
funny, feels below the greater sense of whit involving a stereotypical Christian
family (with a young Jonah Hill looking barely out of childhood) as it comes
off as heavy handed and cheap baiting of that kind of family. The rest of the
film is surprising as, whilst broad, it leads to a very authentic and honest
conclusion, of the chances of life sucking but nihilism and naive positivity
both being problematic when a sense of hope (or friendship smacking each other
in the face with a space hopper) mixes with healthy scepticism would probably
help these characters. Markovski finally believes in the interconnectivity idea
but in his mind because it grows from the manure of human interaction; everyone,
even Jude Law's character, gets a sympathetic moment and a conclusion which
attests to this idea, and whilst it's obvious, the subject matter of becoming
complacent, fake or lost is an innately modern concern and Huckabees even still plays it with a pertinent sense of style.
It took six years, and the
incredibly disappointing boxing biopic The
Fighter (2010) for David O. Russell
to make a film. Infamously there was a film called Nailed in production in 2008, about a woman who has a personality
change due to literally getting a nail to the head, but leaving the production,
Russell would have the indignity of
the film finally appearing (after a time as an urban myth) as Accidental Love in 2015, in the midst
of his career resurgence as a populist Oscar nominated filmmaker. In fact,
revisiting I Heart Huckabees, its
sad David O. Russell made a film as
predictable and bland like The Fighter
(2010), even if it also has a good Mark
Wahlberg role, an average film which emphasised why I find biopic one of
the least rewarding of film genres where they are usually so predictable. Maybe the likes of Silver Linings Playbook (2012), his darkly humorous romantic comedy
about people with mental illness, or even Joy
(2015), a potentially unconventional biopic about Joy Mangano, the inventor of the Miracle Mop and entrepreneur,
might have the same eccentricity, especially I do remember seeing American Hustle (2013) in the cinema
and liking it a lot. I can only hope that barring the infamous backstage
meltdown, David O. Russell would look
back to films like this and still be influenced by it.
Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric/Existential/Philosophical/Whimsical
Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None
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1) Reference quoted from HERE
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