Darkness Risible
by Chris Dashiell

Philosophy is not a subject that is often dealt with in mainstream American film, so it's a wonder that David O. Russell somehow got a major studio to finance one of the silliest movies in years, I Heart Huckabees. But I'm glad he did. It's a comedy about people searching for the meaning of life, and the struggle between conflicting world views, but it's all done in such a lighthearted, casual style, that it manages to provoke thought in between the laughs.

Jason Schwartzman plays Albert Markovski, a scruffy poet and environmental activist who fears that his campaign to save some marshland is being co-opted by a Wal-Mart type business called Huckabees, and its glamor-boy representative Brad Stand (Jude Law). A series of coincidences causes Albert to seek the help of a pair of existential detectives (played by Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin) who use various methods to evaporate his ego so that he can experience the essential unity of all things. But an encounter with another client, a fireman (Mark Wahlberg) who believes petroleum is the root of all evil, leads him into the arms of Caterine Vauban (Isabelle Huppert), a French philosopher who teaches that the universe is a meaningless pit of cruelty and despair. Meanwhile, Brad's attempt to manipulate the detectives to his own advantage ends up flipping out his girlfriend and Huckabees spokesmodel Dawn (Naomi Watts).

Did you get all that? I didn't think so -- but plot and believability are not the point here. Instead of constructing a story in order to dramatize ideas, which is the usual boring way of doing things, Russell has decided to present ideas up front, as if they were characters in themselves, and then have the actors react to them. This bizarre concept has the disadvantage of giving the film an insubstantial feeling. If events are subject to the rapid fluctuation of abstract ideas, then whatever does happen in the story seems not to matter very much. The film's success, then, depends on the acting and the cleverness of the dialogue, and luckily the picture is fairly strong on both those fronts.

Hoffman and Tomlin are clearly enjoying themselves, and by taking their absurd characters seriously, manage to be very funny most of the time. Law shows comic flair playing the epitome of self-satisfied corporate advancement, and Huppert gets to spoof her own art house image -- for once, having a character seem like she's from another movie is exactly the point. Best of all is Wahlberg as the impulsive fireman, investing his character's single-minded quest for meaning with a mixture of childlike earnestness and unpredictable aggression. On the other hand, Schwartzman is a bit too erratic a performer to hang a movie on (he holds his own, but never soars) and Watts seems unsure of herself in a comic role.

The wonderful thing about I Heart Huckabees is that it really is about philosophical ideas. It doesn't just spoof them as ridiculous distractions that aren't worth our time (as Woody Allen did, for instance, in Love and Death), but wants to explore them, and the consequences when people believe in them, in a context that is both humorous and understanding. Russell and his co-screenwriter Jeff Baena know that ideas can be seen as funny without having to take an anti-intellectual stance. Here the comic tension is between a belief in "pure being" (Hoffman/Tomlin), which resolves everything into unity and acceptance while failing to take the experience of suffering into account, and a belief in "no meaning," (Huppert) that seeks to remove illusory transcendent consolations from our human drama while failing to acknowledge our sense of wonder, mystery and connection.

It took a kind of courage, and a deft style, to convey all this without being heavy-handed, and although some of the humor misses the mark, the overall effect is delightful. Russell's artificially bright color scheme, and playful use of graphics, gives the film an unusually loose narrative thrust. The impression (no doubt a false one) that the story is being made up as we go along, helps to accentuate the unreality. The visual texture is similar to the kind of "hip" advertising that pretends to make fun of itself while selling you beer. The plot element concerning the environmental movement is secondary to the philosophical struggle (which is odd), but it is, nonetheless, connected, with Russell and Baena taking swipes at the mindless consumer culture without ever being too obvious about it. This is one of the most subliminal satires you'll ever see.

I Heart Huckabees has been heavily promoted because of its all-star cast, but it's not anything like the usual comedies you'll find at the multiplex. It's intelligent, yet weird and demented -- but without a trace of cynicism. My hat's off to Russell for grappling with age-old human questions in a totally different and entertaining way.

Bush's Brain: it sounds like a science fiction film. If only it were. Actually it's a documentary about Karl Rove, George W. Bush's closest advisor and the director of his political operations. Michael Shoob and Joseph Mealey have based their film on a book of the same title by Texas journalists Wayne Slater and James C. Moore. There's nothing flashy here -- they simply assemble a series of interviews with Rove associates and rivals, and various observers of Texas and national politics, to chart his astounding rise to what is basically the position of co-president.

The movie presents a devastating indictment of a style of politics in which the ends justify the means. In this case the means consist of lying and dirty tricks. In an early Texas governor's race, with his candidate slipping in the polls, Rove claimed that his office had been bugged by the Democrats, creating a phony distraction that ended up winning the election. All the evidence pointed to Rove planting the bug himself. We then see how he used improper influence with the FBI to harass and eventually send to prison two employees of political rival Jim Hightower. After becoming George W. Bush's campaign manager in his run for governor, there occurred a Rove specialty -- the whispering campaign set off by supposed third parties, in this case the whispers saying that Governor Ann Richards was a lesbian.

Later, in the South Carolina primary in the 2000 Presidential campaign, the whispers said that John McCain had an illegitimate black "love child." In fact, McCain and his wife had adopted a Bangladeshi girl from Mother Teresa's orphanage, but Karl Rove didn't care as long as the racist smear helped his man win. Then in the 2002 midterm elections, he put a picture of Georgia Senator Max Cleland, a war hero who lost both legs and an arm in Vietnam, next to those of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, painting him as unpatriotic. In addition, Rove's fingerprints are all over the more recent outing of Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife as an undercover CIA agent. Finally, he has shamelessly exploited the tragedy of 9/11 and the War in Iraq as political opportunities for Bush and the Republicans.

Bush's Brain is a real education -- to watch it is to lose any illusions one might have had about the kind of people who are making decisions affecting the entire world today. In the unlikely event that you are not yet outraged (assuming you can think) -- this ought to do the trick.

©2004 Chris Dashiell
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