Unless you happen to be one of those diabolical tossers who insist upon laughing uproariously lest anyone suspect that you didn’t catch the Marcuse reference (get over yourself, they drop those in Meg Ryan movies), then American Indie comedy is frequently a more contradictory notion than a permanent Tottenham manager. Sure, Charlie Kaufman can inspire a kind of goofy delirium, Whit Stillman is always divinely arch and if you’re having a bad day then La Bute’s gleeful spite will hit the spot, but generally the sector trades on knowing smiles and daffy idiosyncrasies rather than belly laughs.
Happily, David O. Russell, having already bucked the overarching trend with the fabulous Flirting With Disaster, has now turned up with this delightful curate’s egg, though one would have to say that I Heart Huckabees is more funny peculiar than funny ha-ha. This anti-corporate quirk-fest sees Jason Schwartzman’s environmentally-concerned crap poet hire cooler-than-thou existential detectives Lily Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman to determine the meaning behind a series of coincidences involving a Sudanese immigrant. Within minutes the bizarre new-age investigators are squirreling through Schwartzman’s dustbins, peering through his bathroom window and asking awkward questions about their client’s rivalry with Jude Law’s carefully tousled corporate climber. Ostensibly their quarrel is rooted in Jude’s noxious retail giant employers - the eponymous Huckabees – attempting to build on precious marshland, but is their mutual animosity maybe down to some crypto-Buddhist quantum mechanical fissure?
This endearing Resnais-inspired conundrum explores such baffling propositions and posits that all life is interconnected, then flip-flops to suggest something about being and nothingness before advancing the notion – if I correctly understand the film’s philosophical conceits - that Shania Twain is possibly the centre of the universe. Hmm. You’d just have to be there. Maybe, just maybe, and bearing in mind that this is Russell’s first film since Three Kings, its all an engagingly fucked-up hieroglyphic representing Gulf War II. Or perhaps some kind of dumb-show wrestling match between corporate interests and the anti-globalisation movement? Or an anti-therapy satire?
Oh really, who cares? I Heart Huckabees is far too much fun to argue with. Imagine They Might Be Giants rewritten by Sartre and Groucho Marx and a frantic surrealist farce full of playful Bunuelian visual tricks aimed squarely at those still basking in the Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind. Thankfully, the film is quirky only in it’s utter uniqueness rather than being self-indulgently leftfield. The awesomely hip cast – including Naomi Watts as a corporate cheerleading floozy turned Amish-imitating slob, Mark Wahlberg as an angst-ridden fireman and Huppert’s wicked nihilist analyst – are all note-perfect and even if Mr. Russell’s entertainment doesn’t move the earth for you, it’ll still take you down a laneway and show you a good metaphysical time.
Now, if only someone could advance a hypothesis to explain Dustin Hoffman’s haircut. Johnny Ramone lives, apparently.