i ♥ huckabees
I Heart Huckabees
**/****
starring Dustin Hoffman, Isabelle Huppert, Jude Law, Jason Schwartzman
screenplay by David O. Russell & Jeff Baena
directed by David O. Russell
by Bill Chambers David O. Russell's debut feature Spanking the Monkey now bears the mark of Kane. (Citizen, that is.) A funny, caustic mood-piece that heralded the Second Coming of Hal Ashby, it was also an impossible thing to live up to–or down, for that matter, Spanking the Monkey's mother-son incest plot in some ways a modern correlative to Citizen Kane's taboo-shattering demystification of William Randolph Hearst. Russell's work since (Flirting with Disaster, Three Kings) has been off-beat but circumspect, and at first, I ♥ Huckabees seems like a return to rebellious form, what with its wilfully uncommercial throughline: To find out why he's crossed paths with the same African stranger on three separate occasions, environmental activist Albert (Jason Schwartzman) hires a pair of "existential detectives" (Lily Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman), who in turn encumber his mission to stop corporate foe Brad (Jude Law, essentially resurrecting Dickie Greenleaf) from building a Huckabees department store on a sacred patch of marshland. But it's smug anachronisms that make the film as alienating as it sounds: the dialogue has a Hawksian tempo hardly honoured by the sitcom-level punchlines, while the retro iconography for Huckabees is, however evocative (prepare to be floored by Naomi Watts's banal poses as the spokesmodel for the chain (I ♥ Naomi Watts)), ultimately unmoored–you never get to see inside a Huckabees outlet, which places the brunt of satiric emphasis on the marshland rather than on the ersatz Wal-Mart. (With suburban sprawl all but ignored, Huckabees needn't ever have its business characterized.) Though clever in fits and starts (film buffs should get a charge out of Isabelle Huppert's comic take on her sick character from The Piano Teacher), I ♥ Huckabees only really catches fire during a Dinner From Hell presided over by Richard Jenkins–not surprisingly, a saving grace of the similarly arch but far funnier Flirting with Disaster–and Jean Smart, two of the best-kept secrets in Hollywood. Programme: Viacom Galas
