I Heart Huckabees movie review (2004)

Their method is to follow a client everywhere, taking notes on all that he does. "Even into the bathroom?" Yes, even into the bathroom. Bernard and Vivian now begin to be seen in the backgrounds of many shots, or outside the windows, or behind the door, or under the furniture, taking notes. They need to see everything in his life because they believe that everything is connected, and so to know everything is to know all the connections.

Brad the double-crossing executive decides to undercut Albert by hiring the detectives to also follow him and Dawn around. Albert, meanwhile, meets a fireman named Tommy (Mark Wahlberg). Tommy is so eco-conscious that he refuses to ride the fire truck to fires, pedaling alongside on his bike. (He usually gets there first.) Tommy for reasons unclear to me knows about another Existential Detective named Caterine Vauban (Isabelle Huppert), who is from France. She is an old enemy of the Jaffes, and no wonder: French existentialists define themselves by being old enemies. Catherine has a peculiar sex scene in a mud puddle.

Everybody talks a lot, the Jaffes in particular. They do a kind of double act, finishing or repeating each other's sentences. They seem to believe quantum physics is somehow involved in their theories, and talk about how two objects can be in different places at the same time -- no, hold on, that's the easy part. They talk about how the same object can be in two places at once.

Their discussions about this quantum phenomenon reminded me wonderfully of the explanations of the same topic in "What the #$*! Do We Know," a recent "documentary" in which one of the "expert physicists" has been unmasked as a chiropractor, and the filmmakers are all followers of Ramtha, a 35,000-year-old spirit guide from Atlantis. Because nobody knows $#!t about quantum physics, this doc actually got respectful reviews from gullible critics like me, because it made about as much sense as most of what I've read on the subject.

Individual moments and lines and events in "I Heart Huckabees" are funny in and of themselves. Viewers may be mystified but will occasionally be amused. It took boundless optimism and energy for Russell to make the film, but it reminds me of the Buster Keaton short where he builds a boat but doesn't know how to get it out of the basement. The actors soldier away like the professionals they are, saying the words as if they mean something. Only Wahlberg is canny enough to play his role completely straight, as if he has no idea the movie might be funny. The others all seem trying to get in on the joke, which is a neat trick. I will award a shiny new dime to anyone who can figure out what the joke is.

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