Sun, October 3, 2004

There's a moment in I ♥ Huckabees when Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin are scampering across a suburban front lawn and trying to avoid getting hit by sprinklers with about as little success as you could possibly imagine. They're dressed in the mod boardroom-casual attire they wear through the entire film – all greys and blacks and creamy whites – and they're carrying an armload of recording equipment and notebooks. The score is plinking along in an upbeat, minimalist way, mixing gleefully with the sound of water slapping Tomlin's business skirt and her sharp, under-the-breath interjections of frustration. It perfectly captures the peppy, rollicking tone of the film, which rushes headlong in every direction (and in no direction at all) from its first scene to its last.

Hoffman and Tomlin play Bernard and Vivian, a husband and wife team of self-described Existential Detectives. It sounds like something out of Douglas Adams (particularly, his book Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency) – and more than likely the germ idea of the film finds its inspiration there. Bernard and Vivian take separate approaches to each case: she delves into minutiae, surveillance, and physical evidence while he focuses on the metaphysical – what Dirk would describe as "the fundamental interconnectedness of all things." Bernard explains the theory with a blanket in a scene I could recount for you, but thankfully the I ♥ Huckabees website offers bite-sized synopses in the form of AIM Buddy Icons (the most brilliant use yet of this, the most irritating movie marketing medium).

If you've ever seen Scott Bakula explain time travel with a string on Quantum Leap, it's similar – Bernard's blanket represents time and space, though. I guess that's why it's bigger.

The film begins when Albert (Jason Schwartzman of Rushmore) contracts Bernard and Vivian to explain a strange series of coincidences he's been experiencing. Almost immediately, the detectives trace the problem to other sources, including Albert's struggle for control of the local chapter of eco-conservation group Open Spaces, of which he is a founder. He's having trouble keeping Open Spaces moving in the right direction because Brad, the charismatic sales manager that he's collaborated with (Jude Law, in his second non-irritating role in two weeks – who knew?) is starting to dominate the group. Brad works at Huckabees, which is a nationwide department store that resembles Target with Wal-Mart's ethics, or Wal-Mart with Target's bright design sense and cheery advertisements. For Brad, the association with Open Spaces is an opportunity for some community-minded publicity and a celebrity gala event. For Albert, the battle to save the marshland is more personal. Their personalities clash, there is much fantasizing about machete-based dismemberment, and the rest of the story spirals outward from there like those little flying sensors from Twister that flew up inside the tornado and bleeped and blooped.

It's an indescribably giddy ride. Bernard's view of the world (and his battle with (French!) nihilist nemesis Caterine Vauban, played by Isabelle Huppert) stock the story with grand ideas about our being, our reality, and our place in the universe – even our subatomic makeup. It's sometimes hard to know whether Bernard and Vivian are helpful or just meddling nutjobs with best intentions, but the good news is that it doesn't matter. The viral impact of their dogma affects all the characters of the film and creates a joyful collusion of deep – or at least deep-sounding – ideas. The concepts addressed in I ♥ Huckabees are fascinating, but in a pleasantly unimposing way: you can decide for yourself what you think about these ideas, or you can not think about them at all. You don't have to figure it out in order to enjoy the movie or understand it – it's just a fun exercise on your own. This is always my favorite thing for a movie to do: give me something enjoyable to think about. I ♥ Huckabees does it in nearly every scene. The characters get into heated debates about philosophical topics, and while on the surface these dialogues are played for typical indie-movie chuckles, there is something more there. There's a delightful debate around a suburban family's dinner table that is chaotic and hilarious, with Schwartzman and Mark Wahlberg debating Richard Jenkins while the kids interject excitedly. The dialogue is absolutely hilarious and the writing and the performances ring perfectly true.

And you're not going to hear me extol the virtues of a film I enjoy without mentioning tone. I ♥ Huckabees has a colorful, pleasant tone that owes a great deal to the performances – everyone is great, including Naomi Watts as Brad's girlfriend and the Huckabees spokesmodel, whom research indicates that I had never before seen in a movie – as well as the music and design. The score and the look of the film both serve the semi-European "mod" feel without becoming too self-conscious or distracting. The look of the detectives' office, the car Bernard drives, the semi-retro surveillance equipment, all contribute to a feel that's playful and slightly askew. The locations, including suburban Hermosa Beach and an apartment building on my street (My Staples! Right there in the background!) contribute to a sort of Anytown, USA look.

This site has a visual indicator for reviewing things, based on attractive little star graphics, but its limitation is that it can only represent how many stars something has achieved out of the possible five. What I really need is a meter for expectation exceeding. Maybe I need a graphic that represents simultaneously how many stars I thought it was going to get as well as how many stars it did earn. Like Lost: five out of three and a half out of five stars. I ♥ Huckabees and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow would both do well on the expectation exceeding meter – and, in some way, I'm sure both were helped by the fact that I'm usually no fan of Jude Law, so his surprisingly enjoyable performance in each helped elevate it above what I expected. But I ♥ Huckabees gets extra credit beyond that, because it exceeded my expectations even more than I expected it to. So many indie films like it can miss the mark and become boring and self-important. This film doesn't. (It does, however, have the power to polarize – it happens to land squarely in my wheelhouse and appeal to a lot of things I think about with a tone I happen to appreciate; others could very easily find it tedious.) It left me in a really good mood, feeling silly and happy. I'm not going to look away from that.

Definitely go see I ♥ Huckabees. Maybe you won't like it as much as I do, but I don't think you'll regret it. There's something fun to explore no matter what. And, if you're looking for more information or really want to waste some time, the Fox Searchlight marketing people have taken that increasingly common misstep of designing pretend websites for the entities in the film. (This is mostly harmless, but it seems like a huge waste of time, especially in this case where the sites aren't even particularly tongue-in-cheek or interesting on their own.)

Huckabees Corporate: www.huckabees.com
Open Spaces: www.open-spaces.org

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