Columbia: I [heart] Huckabees

Wendy and I went to see this movie last night at the Ragtag Cinema in Columbia, MO last night.

Before we went in, I overheard one person ask the theater's owner what "I Love Huckabees" was about. The owner corrected him: "I Heart Huckabees," he said, "is difficult to explain. It's about a young man who hires existential detectives to sort our his life." I think it's more about the strain of our shattered beliefs.

Albert (Jason Schwartzman) does go to the existential team to resolve a series of coincidence in which he runs into the same tall African man on three separate occasions. Lily Tomlin's approach is to divine an answer in the most mundane details of his day-to-day life--she spies on him at all hours of the day, goes through his trash, and trails the people in his life. Dustin Hoffman, on the other hand, goes to work on understanding of the world by goading him into breaking down his experiences into quantum physics; things are simultaneously neither here nor there and everything is interconnected. Meanwhile, a nihilistic French woman insinuates herself into his life by representing another existential view, that nothing is connected and that nothing matters. The woman, a former student of the two detectives, is at war with them over this young man's soul.

The movie is too long by half and is filled with bits and pieces gleaned from much more coherent essays. In a nutshell, the hero learns that he is in a constant state of self-sabotage, that he is the one who starts the chain reactions that eventually lead him to failure.

More interesting is the political position the film stakes out. Most of the characters are confused, do-gooding lefties who are hopelessly mired in a post-belief state. The detectives search for clues in the trash or in the way a subject brushes his teeth. They convince him to lie down inside a closed-up body bag in their office so he can perform mental exercises (which, he learns afterward, he can also do by just closing his eyes--still, they force him into the body bag again later in the movie). The French nihilist shows him and his "other" (a partner-in-loss played by Mark Whalberg) how to reach a state of understanding by beating each other in the face with a balloon and by pushing the hero's face into the mud. In contrast, the Christian family we meet are content to live in a nice suburban house, eat dinner together, be religiously observant, and to share their extra with an orphaned African who, like them, is merely seeking to better himself in the land of opportunity...and score some celebrity photographs. Wahlberg lays into them at dinner for their complicity in their consumption of petroleum, and the family just doesn't see his point. They're living by the rules and trying to better the world--so what if they have an SUV in the driveway?

Clearly, as the filmmakers have set the scene, the crazy ones are the truth-seeking duo who storm out of the house and shake their heads in disapproval at the family.

We also see the sterile corporate office of Huckabees that gets into the open-spaces scene to improve its public image and mysteriously decides that the land in question--the one being saved from development--would be a great place to put a new supercenter. This project actually becomes Brad's undoing. When the other folks from the Open Spaces committee learn what has happened, they spit on him in disgust. He whines to them, "But I saved 20 of the trees!"

So what's it all mean?

It all comes down to faith. In the absence of proof, faith can steer you in the right direction or in the wrong direction, but the point is that it's steering you. Without a rudder, you will go nowhere.