Flak Magazine: Review of I Heart Huckabees, 11.03.04

For as long as they've existed, department stores have symbolized the dehumanization modernity asserts on the common man — ultimate convenience as the utopian promise of the technological age. As the turn of the century, French painter-cum-muckraker Eduard Manet captured the underlying prostitution and dissonant glare of the department store in his final painting, "A Bar at the Folies-Bergere." His friend Emile Zola devoted much of his prolific career to this theme; in one of his best works, "The Ladies' Paradise," a provincial lass moves to the city and is devoured by the department store in which she works, unable to function without it. Stateside, artists have used the department store mostly as an ironic symbol of the American Dream, a facade of capitalist greed — rarely do they go inside the store. The closest approximation of the French obsession is Don DeLillo's "White Noise," which uses the symbols of modernity (the buzz of the supermarket, a snowy television) to comment on how the conveniences of the modern world simply gloss over impending death — the white noise of eternity, if you will. Recently American movies have risen to complement DeLillo; 2002 brought us both The Good Girl and One Hour Photo, which are obsessed with the department store in the same way the early French modernists were. The Good Girl's "Retail Rodeo" drove Jennifer Aniston's Justine into a relationship with an angry young man (whose nametag reads "Holden") lashing out at the "bullshit of the world." In One Hour Photo, Mark Romanek filmed Wal-Mart as a maddening glaze of fluorescent light and incessant buzzing, the white noise as the insanity wrought by forcing humans into a hyper-sterilized environment.

Now comes David O. Russell's department store odyssey I Heart Huckabees. Unintentionally released on the heels of Jacques Derrida's death, Huckabees makes its hay by mocking deconstructionism (the bleaker and Frencher, the better), specifically by deconstructing its characters' relationships to a Target-esque symbol of airbrushed perfection and convenience called Huckabees. There's Albert (Jason Schwartzman), a sexually frustrated liberal activist fighting the new Huckabees store, who sits and pouts on the one rock he has so far saved from suburban sprawl. There's his Tyler Durden, Brad Stand (Jude Law), a hotshot Huckabees executive whose entire persona is built on one story he has about Shania Twain not liking mayonnaise. His girlfriend is Dawn (Naomi Watts), a star-spangled bikini model who hawks Huckabees goods to needy suburban housewives. Finally, there's Tommy Corn (Mark Wahlberg), the existentially depressed white trash firefighter whose hose goes limp in his hands.

The movie centers on Albert — imagine Max Fisher from Rushmore a decade later. The movie opens with a barrage of Albert's internalized profanity; he's pissed off that no one gives a damn that Huckabees is about to pave over woodlands. After a series of random encounters with a tall Sudanese man, he goes to the existential detectives — Vivian and Bernard (Lily Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman) — and begins to get "The Big Everything." This explains Hoffman's wig: He and Tomlin are hippie-era intellectuals who follow you around and watch your every move, lest a small gesture unravel the true nature of your existential dilemma. One of their first moves is to put the subject in a body bag where he has symbolic dreams. The whole point is that the existential detectives reflect back all your fears and anxieties until you figure out the meaning.

That is, unless the deconstruction becomes so bleak that the detectives' nemesis, Caterine (Isabelle Huppert), takes over. She seduces the despondent radical with whispers about the bleakness of mankind, advising that "Once you realize how the world works, you can deconstruct yourself into blackness" and that pain "is inevitable to be drawn back into human drama." To her, after you deconstruct, nothing is connected, and thus everything is meaningless. At the home of Andrew's self-involved parents, she tells him of his connection to the Sudanese man: "He was orphaned by civil war. You were orphaned by indifference." Russell is bitterly mocking French intellectualism, culminating in Albert and Caterine getting each other off with handfuls of mud saved from the new Huckabees store. If you think that's funny, then I Heart Huckabees is going to be a real hoot.

Then there's the executive/model couple. Dawn goes from the idealistic image of the modern woman to asking men if they can accept her in an Amish bonnet. Brad goes from corporate golden boy to unemployed schmuck because his self-imposed deconstruction has exposed his cool-guy facade. His favorite spiritual book is "Sacred Hoops" by Phil Jackson; she sees her toned ass as a useful tool in bringing modern convenience to the everyday housewife. Enter the deconstructionists, and their relationship disintegrates thusly: "There's glass between us. You can't deal with my infinite nature, can you?" "That is so not true. Wait, what does that even mean?" This, after we see Brad spend much of the movie admiring his wife on the video screen as she films her Huckabees ads. So, if you find this philosophically and intellectually rich, you've again proved that I Heart Huckabees is the movie for you.

The only reason the movie doesn't descend into unbearable pretension is Wahlberg's Tommy. When his wife walks out on him, she screams, "This is not the life I wanted!" He screams back, "What does that even mean, honey?" and then he gets popped in the face. Once he's met the detectives, someone calls Bernard his "therapist," and Wahlberg decks him. Wahlberg's anger is comical, further mocking the deconstructionists: What would happen if the average Joe bought this stuff, rather than just stuffy intellectuals? Before he met the deconstructionists, Tommy put aside his anger at the world because work provided for his family. But if firefighting and family ultimately have no meaning or purpose, then why not lash out at the world? Everyone would get beat up, and everything burnt down. And what about religion? Little girl: "Jesus is never mad at us if we live with Him in our hearts!" Tommy: "I hate to break it to you, but He is — He most definitely is."

Russell goes even further by making Albert and Tommy partners in existential exploration — deconstruction via the buddy system, if you will. Russell's contrast of the two leads to this: The deconstructionist belief in interconnectedness leads to non sequiturs that exacerbate existential depression. When someone says Tommy's a hero for being a fireman, he replies "We'd all be heroes if we stopped using petroleum," — because, he says, using gasoline means that you don't care about kids working in sweatshops. By contrast, the virtual nihilism of the French leads to a darker depression — the "inevitable pain of the human drama." So, whether you're a do-gooder who "sees the big picture," or just some guy who thinks the world is out to screw you, take your pick and be on your way to a life of misery!

In the end, Russell doesn't care if you care about any of these people. He wants to make fun of French intellectuals and mock liberals — liberal happiness, he argues, comes at the expense of the successful. Albert even writes bad poetry: "Nobody sits like this rock sits. You rock rock. The rock just sits and is. You show us how to just sit here and that's what we need." And though Huckabees may crush that rock like it crushes our souls, that existential rock will crush all our souls eventually. I guess. This film is one big experimental joke, the butt of which seems to be the liberal activist.

As such, I Heart Huckabees comes at a fitting point in Russell's career. His last movie, Three Kings, brought the Iraqi perspective of American occupation right into the multiplex, and was noted by Bill Clinton himself as great explanation of why occupation of Iraq simply wouldn't work. Russell even headed to Iraq earlier this year to film interviews with soldiers, trying to bring the on-the-ground human dimension to our perception of the current conflict. The resulting documentary, Soldiers' Pay, got buried by the studio. To him, and to fans of Three Kings, it seems so obvious. And yet, America didn't listen. So why make movies? Why care? Why not just give up on activism if all people want is cheap oil and Huckabees convenience? Are we so distracted by Huckabees' cardboard cutouts of Shania Twain that it's not even possible to give a shit anymore? Maybe we're supposed to consider it hopeful that Russell also rejects this notion by mocking the near-nihilists who might have us think otherwise. Or maybe I'm just going in meaningless circles, trying to break down this movie to its essentials in search of a meaning that simply may not exist.

— Stephen Himes (stephenhimes@hotmail.com)