I Heart Huckabees (2004)

 

Would-be eco warrior Jason Schwartzman approaches an existential detective agency to solve his life crisis and meets a series of odd balls on a journey of self discovery.

David O. Russell’s surreal comedy certainly has a very impressive cast and its attempt at mocking society’s obsession with self help and hypocritical moral outrage certainly sounds good – on paper. Unfortunately none of the promise shown by the idea is realised; the whole film seemed to me to be just as pretentious and self indulgent as Schwartzman’s  own “poetry”. It doesn’t really seem to make any coherent points at all, just the inevitably self-conscious mix of forced kookiness and self-absorbed naval gazing I’ve come to expect from this kind of indie comedy; in fact, the whole thing whiffed of the faint aroma of bovine excrement to which it claims to take such exception. The cast kept me watching, but the humour was obvious and unfunny and it fell to Mark Wahlberg to salvage something from the film, as his performance seemed the most honest and amusing.

But the bottom line is that I Heart Huckabees just isn’t very funny, which for a so-called comedy is a pretty fatal flaw.

4/10