Always Right Movie Review'dustries

What do Shania Twain, a devout Christian Electrical Engineer, a fireman, a business executive, an environmentalist pro bono worker, "The Ball Thing", a female French Nihilist, the global politics of petroleum, and a crack squad of "Existentialist Detectives" including Dustin Hoffman have in common?

Nothing, right?

Or Everything...

I [heart] huckabees is not for everyone. Or is it, and they just don't know it yet? At any rate, it definitely was for me. Few films have made me laugh as hard as this movie while tickling my dendrites with philosophical musing, taking me back to the days when I first saw the Monty Python movies, only with more of an expressive point.

Maybe.

This is a truly chaotic and hilarious depiction of people and their neuroses, questions, fears, and resolutions about life and its apparent meaningfullessness--a film that examines the identity crises of a string of people and the ways in which our worldviews collide, mingle, divide us, and, ultimately, can unite us.

Or, is it a tortuous, trite mockery of metaphysics too quirky for its own good, alienates any audience not familiar with existentialism and Buddhism, and is ultimately meaningless itself?

Who knows. All I know is I had a great time watching it.

It begins with a string of cuss words from Jason Schwartzman (who also starred in the lead role of Rushmore with Bill Murray, another must-see comedy that begins, as most must-see comedies do, with a really complicated, unsolvable math problem). Schwartzman plays a young man who has started his own environmental organization (he is a tree-hugger, if you will), and is wrestling with the compromise of his environmental values in order to promote environmentalism with a big suburban-sprawling company.

He also keeps running into this really tall guy from Africa. What is up with this coincidence?

To find out he goes to the Existentialist Detectives, whose business card he happens to find in a suit jacket.

The Existentialist Detectives do not mess around. They know what's up, and they know how to get other people to know what's up. Dustin Hoffman is particularly great.

Anyway, so they decide to take up Schwartzman's case. Only they say the coincidences of running into the tall guy from Africa might be nothing (although it may or may not actually turn out to be something). The real issue they are trying to get at is how well he understands his own life. This involves them spying on him with a vast array of high-tech gadgetry--even when he gets up in the morning to brush his teeth. Like private detectives gathering info. Only their subject of investigation actually knows they are being spied on.

The Existentialist Detectives have another case they're working on--Mark Wahlberg, a firefighter with existential issues. A hilarious combination, it turns out, especially when Wahlberg is really great in this role. He shows the detectives a book he has been reading on Nihilism and how it is really starting to make sense. They take a look at the book. It's author is some philosophizing French woman. Hoffman: "Don't listen to Caterine Vauban. She's full of shit."

Then there's Jude Law playing the business executive Schwartzman is joining forces with, but who may compromise the environmental ideals, who finds out about the Existentialist Detectives Shwartzman hires because they go everywhere with him--even to work (the Existentialist Detectives go where they want, when they want--they are existential bloodhounds), so the business exec. also goes to the detectives thinking he can rattle Schwartzman and get him fired, because he eventually comes to see him as a possible threat to the deal of joining his company to Schwartzman's environmental group (which is good for the company for PR reasons), and in the process tries to fool the detectives into thinking he really thinks he has an existential crisis, and Schwartzman is hooked up with Wahlberg as his "Other"--someone else going through the "dismantling" process that the Existential Detectives impose, but then out of nowhere the French Nihilatrix that Wahlberg was reading shows up and starts trying to take these people's identity crisis into her own hands, showing them the "true way" of life, and the Existential Detectives are like: "What the hell is she doing in America?" "This is worse than we thought." "Much worse". And then more things happen with Jude Law and his model girlfriend (Naomi Watts) who is the public image of his company (oh, which is Huckabees, by the way). And then more stuff happens, Existentialist Detectives vie with Nihilists, lives intermingle, people get hurt, stuff is set on fire, insights are reached, The Ball Thing happens, bonnets are worn...

Sound complicated?

It is.

In the last half, Wahlberg spouts one of my favorite quotes from the movie (of which there are many):

[upon rebelling against Caterine the Nihilist, his new Life Sensei]:

...I'm gonna go to an even darker place of nothingness. From an even farther, more extreme nothingness on my own!

Caterine: Ahh, sublime.

Anyway, I Heart Huckabees might possibly make it onto my list of all-time greatest comedies. It features an amusing look, if maybe too trite and out-of-leftfield to lead many people to enlightenment, at things like a conceptualized (and therefore incomplete) Buddhist outlook (or inlook). Or maybe a "What the--" kick in the pants movie like this will spur people to seek out life's deeper issues (even though the finger (or existential comedy) pointing to the moon (enlightenment) is not the moon, as a Buddhist might say).

Did this movie make me want to seek out life's deeper issues? Not really. I just ended up laughing a lot. And that's what counts.

Or is it?...

Oh, and for Shania Twain fans, yes--she does actually figure into this movie.

Until we figure out a better rating scale, I give this movie of carefully controlled, exquisitely choreographed existential chaos a Godlike rating, with the caveat that I can see how some people would give up on it as utter nonsense.

But, in the end, isn't everything nonsense?

I'm going to answer like Schwartzman when he was asked "Have you ever Transcended all of Space and Time?"

Yes [pause] No.