Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
Last week, I attended the first WGA screening of David O. Russell’s brain-bending new screwball comedy, and I was shocked by how surly and unreceptive the audience seemed to be towards the film. Now, almost a week later, I can’t say it surprises me. Like many of the truly great oddball films, HUCKABEE’S is going to be hotly debated by critics, roundly rejected by mainstream audiences, then eventually embraced as the bold and original vision it is. So how about we skip all the preamble and just celebrate the film’s spectacular and surreal silliness right now?
One of the things that’s going to be most entertaining about the release of this film is watching critics tie themselves in knots to either explain their love or their hatred of the experience. This is a film that defies easy summary, which is one of the things that I loved about it. I’m sure I’ll sound just as crazy as anyone else trying to lay it out... but here I go anyway. Albert Markovski (Jason Schwartzman) is an environmental activist who finds himself in the grips of an existential crisis brought on by his rivalry with Brad Stand (Jude Law), a rising executive who works for the Huckabee’s Department Store chain. Albert’s eco-group wants to stop Huckabee’s from building on a protected marsh, which is how he comes into contact with Brad. What he’s not prepared for is the full force of Brad’s oily charisma. He convinces everyone that Huckabee’s wants to work with the Open Spaces Coalition, even as he undermines Albert’s authority. As this unfolds, Albert has three coincidental encounters with a mysterious black man, and he finds a business card in the pocket of a borrowed suit jacket at a restaurant that leads him to Bernard (Dustin Hoffman) and Vivian (Lily Tomlin) Jaffe, the Existential Detectives. He asks them to help him makes sense of the unraveling threads of his life.
Which begs the question: just what exactly does an Existential Detective do, anyway?
I fell head over heels for this film about the time that Bernard tries to explain that to Albert. Hoffman takes such obvious delight in the material he’s been given that it seems infectious. He lays out the theory of the blanket for Albert, and if I were to try and summarize the theory of the blanket for you here, I’d be doing you and the film a disservice. When you see the movie, though, pay close attention to this scene, because everything else spins out from this moment. It may seem like an absurdist bit of pseudo-philosophy, the first of many in the film, but Russell’s a hellaciously smart director, and the script he co-wrote with Jeff Baena manages to be a very silly conversation about very serious subjects, a combination I found intoxicating.
As Bernard and Vivian dig into Albert’s life, they end up face-to-face with Brad, who decides that he could use their services, too. After all, he’s dealing with his own climb up the corporate ladder, trying to juggle his need to charm everyone he meets with the demands of his relationship with the beautiful Dawn (Naomi Watts), the needy, neurotic supermodel spokeswoman for Huckabee’s. Or, possibly, Brad engages their services just to fuck with Albert’s world a little more. What makes Jude Law’s work so entertaining is that Brad doesn’t seem to know what his motives are any more than we do. Albert’s definitely upset by the notion of Brad ursurping one more piece of his life, and Bernard senses his distress. He decides to pair Albert with another client in crisis, a fireman named Tommy (Mark Wahlberg), who is obsessed with the detrimental effects of a petroleum-based consumer culture on our planet.
And believe me... I’m just barely scratching the surface with these descriptions. This isn’t a spoiler-heavy review because this isn’t a film you can spoil by simply describing it to someone. Every scene has a delicious lunatic energy, dense with dialogue and detail. Take the introduction of Tommy, for example. He’s been working with Bernard and Vivian for a while, but it’s not working for him. Instead of coming to a place of inner peace and gaining some sort of valuable existential insight, he seems to have fallen even deeper into despair. He’s broken his personality down all the way, and in this fragile state, he’s starting to fall for the works of French philosopher Caterine Vauban (Isabelle Huppert), the polar opposite of the Jaffes. She’s a nihilist, an acolyte of chaos, who believes that there is nothing that connects us in this universe and there are no consequences to our actions. She actually used to work with the Jaffes, but she rejected their ideas, and now Tommy feels like her book may have the answers he’s been missing. His wife has had it with him, and he’s starting to freak out his kids and his co-workers. As his wife walks out on him for good, Bernard shows up to try and talk Tommy down.
And somehow, the whole scene plays as fall-down funny.
As philosophies and characters clash, it starts to feel like this entire world is about to spin wildly off its orbit. In many ways, this feels like the direct evolution of the comic sensibility that Russell developed in FLIRTING WITH DISASTER. Every character plays a vital role in the insanity, and there’s a dizzying half-logic to the way things proceed. I’ll admit... I need to see this movie again so I can better enjoy all the connections and the collisions of these ideas. The first time through, I just let it all wash over me, enjoying the surface level of all of it. There are scenes and specific bits of business that I can’t stop playing in my head, like the mud sex or the dinner with the Hooten family or Wahlberg dancing outside the fire or Dawn’s Amish bonnet and her avant garde commercial or Brad’s Shania story and his reaction at the first big board meeting or Tommy and Albert learning about the big red ball. It’s one of those movies, where you get giddy describing it to people because it’s so overloaded with good stuff.
And the performances... ahhhh. Good stuff all around. As I said, Hoffman seems completely engaged here, barely able to suppress his glee as he dances through through his scenes. Lily Tomlin does some of her funniest film work ever as the Ginger Rogers to his intellectual Astaire, her dour impassiveness serving as a deadly comic tool. Jason Schwartzman finally lives up to the promise of RUSHMORE with an incredibly alive lead performance. It’s no easy trick to play an unhappy character in crisis who is supposed to also be an empathetic lead, but Schwartzman does it beautifully. Wahlberg proves to be a perfect foil for him, alternately threatening and childlike, completely believable as a guy just searching for a few answers, frantic and fallible. This is the kind of role that works for Wahlberg, vulnerable and human. I’ve never bought him as the action lead in a film like THE ITALIAN JOB, but this is much closer to what he did in BOOGIE NIGHTS or THREE KINGS. Jude Law demonstrates even more versatility here as a golden boy who may not have quite as firm a grip on the world as he thinks. Naomi Watts has never had a role like this before, and it should make her even more in-demand than she already is. She’s hilarious and oddly touching as a bit of a dim bulb who is blindsided by illumination after coming into contact with the Jaffes. As she deals with her own issues of self-worth, she alienates everyone around her, and Watts makes that struggle moving and funny. Huppert does brave work as Caterine, not afraid to be ugly and unlikeable. She manages to make the most nihilistic statements sound perfectly rational and even seductive. All of this just serves as further proof of Russell’s gift for finding the right cast and conducting them like a comic symphony, everyone adding just the right notes.
Technically, the film is a marvel, bright and beautiful. Peter Deming is a gifted cinematographer. Look at a list of his credits: David Lynch’s MULHOLLAND DRIVE and LOST HIGHWAY, EVIL DEAD II, SCREAM, the first and third AUSTIN POWERS films, and FROM HELL. He’s able to find just the right way to paint each picture, never forcing one particular style. HUCKABEE’S has a warmth that permeates everything, and color is used to impressive effect. K.K. Barnett, the production designer, is building a distinctive resume, having previously worked on ADAPTATION, LOST IN TRANSLATION, and BEING JOHN MALKOVICH. What really pays off the film’s visual fireworks is the sly score by Jon Brion, who may be one of the best film composers working right now. One of this year’s other best scores, ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND, is also by him, but it couldn’t be more different than his work here. He captures the mood of each film perfectly, and his original songs are perfectly deployed emotional time bombs. I can’t imagine many producers who would have the balls to get something like this made by a studio, but Scott Rudin’s name makes perfect sense when it shows up in the credits. Just look at the films he’s releasing in the next few months: THE LIFE AQUATIC, TEAM AMERICA: WORLD POLICE, CLOSER, this film, and LEMONY SNICKET’S A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS. That’s a whole lot of potential greatness (and I can vouch for both this and LIFE AQUATIC as delivering the goods), and a clear indicator of who you should go to if you want a producer who is going to fight for smart, challenging material.
Overall, I HEART HUCKABEE’S is one of those heady brews that wasn’t meant for every audience, but if you’re willing to meet it even halfway, there is an almost embarrassing amount of pleasure to be had. So far, this is easily one of my favorite films of the year.
"Moriarty" out.
