I ♥ Huckabees (2004)
Directed by David O. Russell
A husband-and-wife team play detective, but not in the traditional sense. Instead, the happy duo helps others solve their existential issues, the kind that keep you up at night, wondering what it all means.
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13 films that influenced I ♥ Huckabees
What critics say influenced I ♥ Huckabees
The added coincidence of finding Vivian and Bernard Jaffe's business card in a borrowed dinner jacket sends him to their door (after wondering through mazelike plain white corridors right out of "Punch-Drunk Love").
Huckabees certainly matches the off-kilter rhythms of Punch-Drunk Love and has a dizzying digital editing strategy that suggests Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind .
Russell’s visual depiction of Albert’s visions start out similar to James Stewart’s cut-out floating head in Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” then turns into a brightly-colored and fast-paced nightmare with Albert using a machete on his tormentors.
With its heady mingling of politics, music, and human interconnectedness, I Heart Huckabees is clearly indebted to Robert Altman's Short Cuts, though it fatally lacks that great film's focus and inclusiveness; it's theoretical and academic (complete with Borges-like visual footnotes) where it should be playful and emotional (see Altman's chaotic, yet controlled Los Angeles panorama).
Russell's work since (Flirting with Disaster, Three Kings) has been off-beat but circumspect, and at first, I ♥ Huckabees seems like a return to rebellious form, what with its wilfully uncommercial throughline: to find out why he's crossed paths with the same African stranger on three separate occasions, environmental activist Albert (Jason Schwartzman) hires a pair of "existential detectives" (Lily Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman) who in turn encumber his mission to stop corporate foe Brad (Jude Law, essentially resurrecting Dickie Greenleaf) from building a Huckabees department store on a sacred patch of marshland.
Russell hasn't equaled the laugh-aloud quotient of Flirting with Disaster, but the way he throws zingers at the audience creates enough offbeat moments of humor to make Huckabees worth seeing even by those who don't understand a thing that Hoffman, Tomlin, and Huppert are saying.
And as funny as it is—and it is easily as funny as Russell’s great comedy Flirting With Disaster, and Tomlin and Hoffman together, in particular, are exactly as hilarious as you’d expect them to be—it fully engages the philosophical ideas it brings up.
In Flirting With Disaster, idiosyncratic writer-director David O. Russell proved himself capable of roasting your family neuroses on a slow-turning spit.
David O. Russell begin filmmaking life with his off-beat incest comedy, “Spanking the Monkey,” then went on to his journey of search and discovery of one’s roots in “Flirting with Disaster.”
But Russell (who made "Spanking the Monkey," "Flirting With Disaster" and "Three Kings," all terrific in different ways) and co-writer Jeff Baena lack Anderson's effortlessly smart wit.
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People turned off by the outright analyses in the excellent “Waking Life” will get much more of the same with this, but they won’t realize it, which is what O. Russell really manages to succeed in.
Maybe Russell saw Richard Linklater’s adventurous, yet ultimately ponderous animated rant “Waking Life” a couple years back and saw the pitfalls inherent in a “philosophy movie” that takes itself way too seriously.
But unlike pseudo-didactic directors like Henry Jaglom, who were able to squeeze themselves into the studio system for a while, riding the crestwave of the counter-culture movement after the surprisingly success of films like "Easy Rider," Russell bucks against the current trend of lackluster, impersonal movies for the masses.
"I Heart Huckabees" is the sort of self-consciously surreal comedy that Charlie Kaufman would write, a la "Being John Malkovich" or "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind."
The film is so obsessed with trying to make sense, it ends up making none whatsoever most times and in tried efforts to look like “Being John Malkovich” really just seems weak in its way.
I ♥ HUCKABEES Or, Being Charlie Kaufman, as writer-director David O. Russell tries to expand the parameters of mainstream cinema as much as the scripter of Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
He’s like a new age Dennis Hopper from “Apocalypse Now”, preaching the gospel, and following along with his spiky hair and wide-eyed expression.
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At times the film reminded me of that scene in "It's a Wonderful Life" where George and Mary are doing the Charleston in the high school gym, unaware that the floor has opened up beneath them and they're just inches away from falling in the pool.
But David O. Russell -- the agent provocateur who gave us sexual angst in Spanking The Monkey, and whose 1999 dramedy Three Kings remains the best film about war of the last decade -- has fun on his mind, and the wacky comedy he devises around the eternal questions of life goes by the philosophically unassuming title of I HEART HUCKABEES.
David O. Russell begin filmmaking life with his off-beat incest comedy, “Spanking the Monkey,” then went on to his journey of search and discovery of one’s roots in “Flirting with Disaster.”
But Russell (who made "Spanking the Monkey," "Flirting With Disaster" and "Three Kings," all terrific in different ways) and co-writer Jeff Baena lack Anderson's effortlessly smart wit.
Well, according to co-writer and director David O. Russell ("Spanking the Monkey," "Flirting With Disaster," "Three Kings"), they are private investigators who try to sort through and make sense of the seemingly random events that happen to all of us.
Russell, the gifted director of "Spanking the Monkey," "Flirting with Disaster" and "Three Kings," is clearly in an existential mood here — this screwy screwball is filled with lines like "You can't deal with my infinite nature," "He called with his own existential conundrum," and "Have you ever transcended time and space?" (To the latter, an anxious Albert bluffs "Time, not space.")
David O. Russell's debut feature Spanking the Monkey now bears the mark of Kane.