Much to my surprise, Huckabees is a thoroughly entertaining, engaging, and thoughtful film with a genuine core of emotion—in almost all respects, exactly the opposite of what I assumed it would be. Jason Schwartzman plays an environmental activist and frustrated poet who hires "existential detectives" Lily Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman to help him get to the bottom of what he calls his "coincidences"—such as running into the same African emigré in three completely different scenarios. He believes that if he can decode the messages the universe has been sending him, he can break through the glass ceiling of misguided angst under which he is stuck. Tomlin and Hoffman are terrific as the new-age-kook married couple trying to help Schwartzman "break through"—Hoffman in particular plays it with obvious relish and that gleam in his eye we haven't seen since, like, Tootsie. Schwartzman is effective, though he's overshadowed (as is most of the cast) by Mark Wahlberg (!), playing quite against type as an intellectually and spiritually anguished fireman. Jude Law and Naomi Watts are pretty good as the Yuppie-type couple who are the symbiant nemeses of Schwartzman and Wahlberg. Isabel Huppert, as a rival existential detective, provided some laughs, but for me she was one "quirky" character too many. Her presence ultimately seemed like just a plot device to break up the "Self/Other" pairings amongst the characters and to lead Schwartzman to a concrete existential choice. A necessary evil, I suppose, when you've got a screenplay that is simultaneously screwball comedy and Godless philosophy. Fortunately, the film wisely avoids trying to explain the meaning of life, leaving its "big ideas" largely unexplained (and sometimes delightfully unexplained, as in a couple of moments where Hoffman appears to be able to physically bend the rules of time and space!). Instead, Huckabees brings its characters back into their personal (not psychic) pain—out of their heads and into their hearts (hence the meaningfully blatant title). It is the ultimate movement of head-to-heart that justifies the many audacious limbs out onto which this film climbs. I didn't "♥" I ♥ Huckabees, per se, but I 😀'd it well enough. (?) :-P 🤷
Review by |