Tuesday October 19, 2004
Why I Heart Huckabees
With fear and trembling, we went and saw I Heart Huckabees this weekend. A lot of critics don’t like it, and the ones who don’t really don’t. Surely I shouldn’t have been worried, however, since this is the same academy that made Mystic River a critical hit and have led some to believe that Garden State is something more than solipsistic junk.
I thought Huckabees was great — a novel and refreshing film. Slate’s David Edelstein, who I almost always agree with — despite the fact that he, like so many, fell for Mystic River — at least gets the initial assessment right:
I Heart Huckabees is a rambunctious intellectual ensemble farce in which a group of disparate people cogitate frantically about the interconnectedness of all things. It’s not exactly common for an American filmmaker to tackle that subject head-on, sans irony; I can think of no comparable film — certainly no comparable American film, although its Preston Sturges-like hustle and its characters’ New Agey earnestness mark it clearly as a weave of New York and Los Angeles sensibilities. No, it’s sui generis: a breathlessly original — almost free-associational — work that seamlessly mixes high and low comedy, that makes sport of its characters’ narcissistic contortions, and yet treats their existential confusion with civilized respect.
Edelstein, and others, just don’t like it. I don’t know why, unless it’s because to be associated with such a sincere enterprise might compromise a reviewer’s cynical bona fides, or because anti-intellectualism has become so fashionable that any movie that talks about anything in philosophical terms has to be immediately discarded as pretentious. EW’s Owen Gleiberman scoffs, for example, at the movie’s “coy highfalutin banter.” The movie is filled with philosophical banter — “highfalutin,” I guess, is in the eye of the beholder — but none of it is as ponderous as, say, Zach Braff’s lugubrious meditation on “home” in Garden State or Laura Linney’s ridiculous Lady MacBeth redux in Mystic River. Those movies bully viewers — and apparently reviewers — into taking them seriously with tone rather than substance. “Stand back everybody,” they seem to announce. “We’re making art over here.”
Huckabees’ tone, on the other hand, intentionally belies its seriousness by creating an offbeat world in which people actually, you know, care about the meaning of life. They wonder about it and dream about it and talk about it and try to work their way through it, often with hilarious results. Mark Wahlberg, for example, plays a fireman who is obsessed with how petroleum products are ruining the planet, confronting anyone who thinks otherwise. Wahlberg nails the portrait of a man whose obsession with environmental peace leaves him with no shot at peace of mind. Like Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, Huckabees is filled with such existential grotesques. There are devout Christians who collect celebrity autographs to plug the gap that Jesus can’t fill. There’s the retail model who realizes beauty isn’t everything. There’s the French nihilist who confronts nothingness with a Bataillean carthesis by rooting in the mud like a pig. (Portrayed by Isabelle Huppert, who appeared in the 1994 movie Amateur by Hal Hartley, to whom Huckabees director David O. Russell is clearly indebted.)
As for the frequent claim that Huckabees is a mess conceptually, this just isn’t true. The husband and wife team (portrayed by Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin) who teach that the universe is animated by interconnectedness and the meaninglessness espoused by their fallen grad student (Huppert), form a perfect dialectic that is not only conceptually sound, but historically accurate. “The universe is meaningless” and “The universe is nothing but meaning” are, after all, the same proposition — or two ways of looking at the same proposition, if you like — as evidenced by the fact that the original French existentialists more or less cribbed their views on acceptance and resignation from Kierkegaard, who was a theist. “All is One,” with or without meaning and whatever you want to call it, and that is where Huckabees’ protagonists ultimately wind up.
Edelstein is correct that Huckabees has no analog in recent American movies — although Hartley’s filmography would be a good place to look — but it is not completely without parallel. Walker Percy’s fake self-help book Lost in the Cosmos also uses humor to get at the lengths to which the humans will go to avoid the big picture. Woody Allen likewise gets there in Manhattan when his character lectures Yale about people filling their lives with meaningless drama so they don’t have to think about the big questions. And George Saunders (who, like David O. Russell, is a Buddhist) seems to be ploughing similar ground in his recent pieces for Slate. In any case, and despite the reviews, I predict Huckabees will long outlive its critics.
Posted by jim at 02:19 PM ||