I ♥ Huckabees (2004)

Instant Favorite.

I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

Your blood may run cold, but you now find yourself pinioned to the story.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

I Heart Huckabees would be better off if it - were more funny and less depressed - were more considerate and less self-centered - paced itself better and loitered less - were more existentially heartfelt and less fussy and dramatic - had more Jessica Lange bathing suit stills - were lighter and less heavy - had more visual aid and less talky talky - were more inspirational and not so stuck in its own head - had more Isabelle Huppert character and less Dustin Hoffman Lily Tomlin characters - were more like it is when Mark Wahlberg and Jude Law are onscreen and everybody's talking over each other being existential-like - were more amusing and less grief-stricken - were fuller of life and less empty feeling - were more appreciative and less critical and so would I. I love I Heart Huckabees. It's an awesome movie and it's pretty hilarious and really good. David O. Russell's best work.(The meaning of life definitely has something to do with the feeling Shania gives blonde-haired Jude when he's telling people his Shania tuna fish story, or the feeling Naomi gives me when I see her posing bent over in her little baby blue shorts and sky blue top shooting her Huckabees commercial. Oh thank you sweet creator. Or something like that.)

There were a lot of different cool ideas going on in this film. It reminded me of if Collateral Beauty and Magnolia had a baby. Obviously, Collateral Beauty was....just embarrassingly bad. But this is what it was going for. Who am I? Am I defined by what I do? What is the meaning of life? Of bad things? Do they just happen? Do they mean nothing? What's the meaning behind coincidences? How will I ever be happy? How will I ever know my place? The film has a quirky and lighthearted way of delivering answers to these questions. It's not subtle. If you find that to be a negative, we can chalk that up to taste. Magnolia is an example of a film with a similar idea, but it was just much more subtle and took a lot longer. In Magnolia's attempt to show that some coincidences are random and some are not, the film by extension felt...kinda random and kinda not. I Heart Huckabees is short, concise, and jam packed with goodness. It's funny that some people who enjoyed this film still thought it was a mess, because I believe it knew exactly what it was doing. It was a delicately articulated and intentional mess. It's also interesting that people find this film to be pretentious, because it's quite the opposite. Exploring the questions it presents is not an easy task, and instead of sitting you down for three and a half hours and explaining the meaning of life to you, it does it through quirky comedy, and the unraveling of wacky characters that mimic us but are not the same as us trying to come to a conclusion, any conclusion. That's been me before. Maybe that's what it takes to like this film. Having "been there done that". Maybe there's no room to appreciate it if you simply can't relate. I've naturally come to the conclusion that life is a little bit of both, so I saw the twist coming. That didn't make the journey any less enjoyable for me. The daydream technique sequences, Brad and Albert's faces morphing together, the coincidence of two people being orphaned in completely different ways, characters continuously losing external things that they considered their identity, liking someone not for what they are but who they are, being a fraud, blaming everything bad that happens in the world on one thing, and finally, being connected through our pain. That's SO MANY IDEAS to try to put into one film. Sounds impossible to me. But, I Heart Huckabees pulled it off only by making it its own unique thing and doing it it's own way. Another lesson in its own. It was a grand and exuberant show from a distance, but all the little moments were more human and real than a lot of the more serious films I've seen. I do heart huckabees.

I Heart Huckabees is a very mediocre movie with a muddled, messy plot, albeit a star studded, talented cast. From an acting standpoint, it is certainly interesting. Many actors take on roles here that are unlike anything they have done before, with Jude Law playing a dedicated businessman, Mark Wahlberg as a down on his luck guy being uplifted and Dustin Hoffman as a smart alec detective. The performances were actually out of this movie's league.It really should have stuck with being a comedy, it tries to hard to be deep, to capture the audiences sole, that it simply comes across as forced and cringe. I also think making Jason Schwartzman the lead protagonist was a mistake, he was the least interesting character, he was bland and uninteresting in comparison to Law and Wahlberg, who bought would have been a better fit as the main character. Tedious and pretentious, I Heart Huckabees has its moments, but not enough of them to possibly recommend. Two detectives help an activist discover what triggers his depression. Best Performance: Jude Law / Worst Performance: Naomi Watts

I Heart Huckabees has Jason Schwartzman seeing the same rather conspicuous stranger Ger Duany on three separate and unrelated occasions. Schwartzman's a guy who thinks way too much and apparently has a lot of money to spend. He hires a pair of 'existential detectives' to find if there's a meaning to all this. That means having detectives Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin following him around all day and making a report.Ger Duany is hard to miss, he's about 6'8" and is a Sudanese refugee and doorman in the building where Hoffman and Tomlin live. His reality is he's really glad to get out of Sudan where they don't have time to explore the meaning of life they just want to live it without being in the wrong religion in their neighborhood. He's an interesting contrast to the rest of the cast.Through various ways the whole cast is intertwined with each other, but then again the whole universe is which is what the film is trying to say. No use in me describing a plot it defies description. Just a series of interesting scenes with a smattering of coherency.There's a notion here that people are trying to do the right thing, but there's no real right or wrong because even standing up for your beliefs can sometimes be absurd. Best scene in the film is firefighter Mark Wahlberg whose main gripe against the world is the oil industry. Wahlberg instead of taking the fire truck to a call with the rest of his mates bicycles to the fire and cuts down on the profits of big oil. Carrying principles to the extreme don't you think.Huckabees by the way is the name of a department store chain that is forever in controversy every time it's the flagship store of another strip mall. Poor Jude Law who's in management is trying to broker a deal about a new mall which will destroy a swamp home to a lot of animals. See what happens to him trying to do the right thing as he conceives it.I Heart Huckabees is quirky and not for everyone's taste. There seems to be a divide of opinion I haven't seen except for religious films from current evangelical sources that you either love or hate. There are some interesting issues raised, but the overall quality of the film is uneven.