I Heart Huckabees (2004)
Well, I didn’t heart this, if that makes any difference to you. Before I start, where have I been? I don’t know either. Screwing around mostly, reading and trying to figure out a good way to not become complacent with my lot in life. Needless to say, I’m mixing things up enough to believe that I’m going to be just fine. I’m looking for answers… come to think of it, it’s sort of like the characters inI Heart Huckabees – all are suffering and existential crisis and don’t know what to make of their lives or their place in society.
Jason Swartzman plays Albert, a young believer trying to find out what a coincidence in his life really means. So he turns to Dustin Hoffman and Lilly Tomlin, who run an “Existential Detective Agency” and do their best to divine meaning and provide confusion for poor Albert and anyone else they come across.
I’m not really sure what to make of this film because it was engaging in a train-wreck sort of way. It’s a movie that’s pondering the existence of itself and the characters in the movie. Mostly, that pondering is for naught, because I Heart Huckabees really isn’t that good of a movie and treads quite clumsily upon the ground where many other good movies have gone.I’m thinking most specifically of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, you know, asking the questions, “what are we and what is our experience and life mean?”
To a certain extent, not the least of which is the fact that Jason Swartzman is the star of this movie, the film tries to copy the tone and style of Wes Anderson’s movies.Perhaps the better way to put it would be to say that the movie “apes” those others because it’s does so clumsily.
I Heart Huckabees isn’t that funny of a movie – it has a lot of nonsense, running around and non-sequiturs that are supposed to be funny (in the vein of Arrested Development) but really just fall quite short. Instead of inducing laughter and guffaws, it induces quite a bit of head-scratching and eye-rolls. And believe me when I say that the movie tries to posit itself as being philosophically superior because of the way that it synthesizes various ideologies. But instead of coming off as such, it comes off as presenting far too many philosophical conflicts to be enlightening in the least.
That’s not to say that I Heart Huckabees isn’t worth a rental, because it certainly is. I just don’t know what to make of something that really isn’t a “movie” in the traditional sense.