I ♥ Huckabees seemed to be a film that was destined to be ignored by the population at large. Too slapstick for the Bergman set and too babbling (baffling?) for the Sandler bunch, the fact that it was a throwback to the old Hawks/Sturges brand of farcical morality play (a subgenre that has been more or less dead for decades outside of the occasional stab at it by the Coens (Intolerable Cruelty) or I ♥ Huckabees‘s director David O Russell). The film seems destined to be remembered for a YouTube clip of Russell exploding on the set in a rage of poorly articulated ‘creative differences’ with actress Lily Tomlin. But ignore that for the moment, everything worked out fine. The end result is a delightfully rewatchable film that gets its philosophical cake and eats it too. It gets to throw out some heady (universal) concepts, mock the confused ‘students’ and the pretentious pedagogy of the teachers, while coming to some level of earnestness in the end (It is like a Guy Maddin flick filtered through Henry David Thoreau and shot in the style of Wes Anderson).
I ♥ Huckabees is perhaps too dense to take in on the first (or second, or third) go around; yet one scene that really sticks out is the one below. Jason Schwartzman takes matters in their own hands, concerning his preoccupation with seeing a tall Sudanese doorman all over town (coincidences or connections?) He takes his ‘other’ (existential buddy), Mark Wahlberg over to the mans house where they are invited in for dinner. Turns out the man is ‘adopted’ by a suburban family of devout Christians headed by exemplary character actors Jean Smart and Richard Jenkins. The dinner starts off with small talk, which exposes the kids (including a young Jonah Hill) smug superiority masking the very ignorance they mock. But with Schwartzmans politically loaded job (he protests suburban sprawl) and Wahlbergs anti-petroleum stance, things devolve into an ‘issues’ shouting match with the ‘Average Americans’ content with facile short-term thinking and denial of long-term consequences and reliance on blind faith. This being fairly ironic, given the confusion and mess of the lives of Schwartzman and Wahlbergs characters’ lives that they are the voice of reason. The scene plays out like something out of a Todd Solodnz film but with more emphasis on the wordplay (“How do you know about my cat?”). A fabulous scene in a fabulous film. Time ought to catch up with Huckabees at some point or another. Is there a cult out there yet? There should be.
Loathe this film, and understanding the basic tenets of philosophy find its juvenile use of concepts all the more grating. This film is a disaster, unfunny, not nearly as clever as it wants to be, horribly miscast. Could not disagree with you more on this one Kurt.
It’s a farce. And a funny one at that. (Subjectivity of humour aside) Placating ones ego ostensibly in the pursuit of truth is a time honoured human pasttime that is delightfully spoofed here. We’ll have to agree to disagree on this one Rot.
No, its objectively unfunny.
@rot, take it from Bill & Ted & So-crates: “The only true wisdom consists in knowing that you know nothing” … “That’s You Dude!”
I love this film, and have since my first viewing in the theater. Count me in the cult, too.
funny you mention that socrates quote, its sort of a mantra of mine.
knowing nothing objectively we still require fictions to go about our lives and so construct them as objectively true. That single brillant line from Socrates is the reminder of this, and can awaken one out of somnolent fanaticism. But it should not be used to destroy everything and wallow in Henrik-like nihilism. It is a piece of wisdom that needs to be used at pressure points to keep us life-enriching. We should be able to recognize that those fictions we create which inhibit us or take from our lives more than they give, that they can be disbanded with Socrates’ mantra, and with perfect doublethink be able to still use those fictions which keep us going. Its a delicate balance.
man’s capacity for doublethink is his/her capacity to self-configure (a la Nietzsche). We are not bound to any one faculty, any one argument unless we impose it upon ourselves. I rail against science, against organized religion because they want to enforce this limitation to our abilities, wants to deny our potential to self-configure and be healthy happy human beings on our own terms. Their socialized agendas have no time for individualized potentials.
Bill and Ted, a wise film.
@rot “We are not bound to any one faculty, any one argument unless we impose it upon ourselves.”
Isn’t this the primary thesis of Huckabees? Cannot this be gently mocked whilst simultaneously embraced?
Jesus, is that Jonah Hill? I never realized he was in this.
I saw Huckabees in the theater and thought it mediocre at best. Convoluted and not particularly funny. Though I remember praising Wahlberg highly in the review. That said, I most look forward to visiting this again for the movie club.
And I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: The first Bill and Ted movie is the most under rated film of all time.
@ Matt Gamble. Seeing Hill in a tiny part was like seeing Jack Black pop up in Bob Roberts or Chris Rock in I’m Gonna Git You Sucka.
gently mocked? its the equiavlent of Moore’s perception of Bush in Farheitheit 911… I am not much for creating Straw Men to prove points, the philosophy in the film is absurd through and through, there is nothing to it, and so the revelation that these philsophies are absurd is no revelation. Its the equivalent of I Now Pronounce you Chuck and Larry having a ‘gays are okay’ moral after depicting them as caricatures throughout the entire film.
@rot, we are coming from different vantage points here. I think Russell is being earnest while mocking, where Sandler & company are just being Crass.
As I said, Huckabee’s is as close as we are going to get to a Sturges film like Sullivan’s Travels in the modern age. A good thing.
I do not see the parallel with Sullivan’s Travels… because in it there is a real thing to play off of, the inherent goodness of common folk, the plight of the poor as being something genuinely stark yet capable of joy too. There is something complex for Sullivan to interact with… I do not find any complexity to what the characters in Huckabee are playing off of, they are truly caricatures and the theories are caricatures. If anything I see a strong contrast between the two films on this point, it would be as if Sullivan sought to understand the impoverished and encountered only stereotypes and superficial ideas, and then learned something from that. But what do you learn from that?
I think the core problem of Huckabee is Russell does not even understand the philosophy he is incorporating in his film, what he likes is the surface veneer of it, and how you can easily make a farce of it… but then there is nothing for the characters to really play off of. If you want to make a comparison, Huckabee’s is more like a Marx Brothers film, where everything is silly and inconsequential. But then it fails to do that fully either because a revelation is shoe-horned in.
awful awful stuff.
@rot “what he likes is the surface veneer of it, and how you can easily make a farce of it”
The need in modern American sound-byte culture for a quick fix is the fallacy of the thinking of the Huckabees heroes (Wahlberg/Schwartzman/Watts) and the fact that it’s not possible, especially in the philosophical world is kinda the point here. One that it makes rather well. Nope, still disagree with you Rot.
Interesting point in comparison to Sullivan’s though, I’ll certainly accede to a disconnect there. Sullivan’s is the better film in that regard. Perhaps (and this’ll open a can of worms) Southland Tales is the more apt modern comparison? (I mean that in a good way, both films use messiness and superficiality of the narrative as a means of commentary on the modern ‘white noise’ miasma of pop-culture and the disneyification of the USA.
“Southland Tales is the more apt modern comparison?”
yeah, they are both crap.
heh. That didn’t take long.