This is what happens when people tell you that you're a genius and you believe them. Writer-director David O. Russell created an incisive, funny and critically-acclaimed Gulf War satire with 1999's Three Kings, and a smart, zany and critically acclaimed screwball comedy with 1996's Flirting With Disaster. Neither was a huge box-office hit, but both have grown in cult status and acclaim since their releases. Russell also has cultivated his image as an eccentric visionary in interviews, even as some people who've worked with him in the past have painted him as an insufferable egomaniac. (Supposedly, members of his crews have nicknamed him "David O. Asshole").
In all likelihood, Russell really is a pretentious prick (that was certainly my assessment when I saw him speak in 2002), but so are plenty of brilliant artists, and that doesn't preclude them from making great art. Both the best and worst thing about Russell's new film, I Heart Huckabees, is the way the filmmaker has completely bought into his own image. Huckabees is the definition of self-indulgent, with nearly every character a mouthpiece for some aspect of David O. Russell, spouting wonky New Age-y platitudes and left-wing propaganda while at the same time lampooning those same values in a self-conscious effort to appear self-deprecating. As a film, Huckabees is an entertaining mess; as a sort of Rorschach blot, it could probably tell a psychologist a great deal about the director's mind.
The most obvious Russell analogue is the protagonist, environmental activist Albert Markovski (Jason Schwartzman, who even looks a little like Russell). Before becoming a filmmaker, Russell was an activist, and he does a good job of portraying the sometimes-futile world of crusaders like Albert, who begins the film reading a poem celebrating his victory in saving a single rock in a vast wetlands from destruction. "You rock, rock," goes one line of the poem, and it gives you a good idea of the sort of humor Russell is going for.
Albert, demoralized by his inability to achieve his activist goals, and convinced that three random encounters with a tall African man indicate some sort of cosmic meaning, seeks out the aid of "existential detectives" Vivian (Lily Tomlin) and Bernard (Dustin Hoffman) to help bring meaning back into his life. Vivian and Bernard talk about the interconnectedness of the universe, zip Albert into a body bag to have him focus his inner thoughts, and spy on him while he's in the bathroom, among other things.
They don't, however, seem to actually help Albert in any way. He's still locked in an epic battle with his nemesis, Brad Stand (a perfectly smarmy Jude Law), an executive at retail chain Huckabees, a Wal-Mart-like corporation that's looking to develop the land Albert is trying to save. Brad is attractive, self-assured and charismatic, dating Huckabees spokesmodel Dawn Campbell (Naomi Watts) and co-opting Albert's environmentalist group with T-shirts and a benefit featuring Shania Twain (who's one of the film's running gags).
There's also firefighter Tommy Corn (Mark Wahlberg), another of Vivian and Bernard's clients who's so anti-petroleum that he rides his bike to the scenes of fires, and Caterine Vauban (Isabelle Huppert), a French philosopher who advocates the opposite of what Vivian and Bernard believe, that nothing is connected and everything is meaningless. What there's not is much of a story, as Albert flails about trying to understand the meaning of existence, Brad and Dawn eventually sign up with the detectives, and the competing schools of thought jockey for screen time.
Huckabees is like every book Russell ever read, every college class he ever took and every stoned discussion he ever had with his activist buddies at 3 in the morning, thrown into one movie and enacted by famous people. It'd be nice to think it is satirizing mystical mumbo-jumbo and endless navel-gazing, but that's giving Russell too much credit. He's said in interviews that he wants people to know the movie is entirely sincere, and he manages to make it seem exactly so. Schwartzman's Albert, Wahlberg's Tommy and even Law's Brad eventually come to similar realizations about their simultaneous significance and insignificance in the universe, realizations we are meant to take as honest object lessons.
But the movie is almost all talk and no action, and that talk gets tedious quickly. What saves it from being a total disaster are the uniformly fresh and funny performances, and Russell's undeniable flair for comedy. It's hard to hate a film that gives much of its philosophical weight to a story about Shania Twain and tuna fish sandwiches. Huckabees is the result of a brilliant filmmaker thinking he's a brilliant philosopher, and assuming moviegoers will be as interested in his deep ideas as his hangers-on are. It's a feature-length act of hubris, but at times it's a damn entertaining one.