After watching it for the 8th or 9th time last night, I remembered why I Heart Huckabees is one of my favorite movies. There are so many details, and each time I watch it I can appreciate it more. The first time I ever saw it was with my aunt Kathy, and she and I laughed through the whole thing, although we weren't entirely sure what was funny about it.
Billed as an "existential comedy", the movie begins when Albert Markovski (Schwartzmann) has a crisis over the significance of four chance encounters with a certain tall African. He goes to the detectives Jaffe (Tomlin and Hoffman) to investigate his coincidence and to give him an overarching explanation about the nature of existence. They begin to examine and interpret his life through a combination of bemusingly vague explanations and near-screwball spy techniques. This leads them into his work situation--he is part of an environmental action organization attempting to save the woods and the marsh from imminent development by the Huckabees corporation. This brings him into conflict with Huckabees liason Brad Stand (Law) and his girlfriend, Huckabees poster-girl Dawn Campbell (Watts). Meanwhile Mark Wahlberg plays Tommy, a firefighter preoccupied with the evils of petroleum. Together he and Albert navigate the waters of existence, including a journey to the dark side, when they leave the "everything-is-everything" approach of the detectives to follow the "everything-is-nothing" teachings of philosopher Caterine Vauban (Huppert).
As character after character gets pulled into the current of existential crisis, the movie begins to dismantle the viewer's reality as much as Albert's. The plot is sidelined by quirky themes and clever dialogue--it is more a collection of scenes than a thread. This is okay, however, because it is about viewing the world as a puzzle--as it gets taken apart and put back together, we see that all of the pieces are the same and yet each is entirely different. And the entire thing is held together by rich and nuanced performances by all of the leads.
Truly, this movie is existential comedy at its best.
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