When thinking about the existence of god (or God), if one is so inclined to question these things, the following formula always comes up. If god does not exist, then life is random, and if life is random then life is meaningless. If life is meaningless...well, that just leads to snide, self-satisfied young adults in funny glasses and black clothing listening to Einstürzende Neubauten.
Huckabees addresses that issue--or more importantly, appears to address that issue. In reality, this movie is about as deep as a wading pool, but it's the perfect context for Russell to parody a huge swath of western culture.
The two points of the argument that Huckabees posits are:
1) Nihilism, or -- there is nothing at the base of it all. The parody is of its pop-culture simplification--the spectacled set replaced by the bespeckled Frenchy author--is an excuse for debauchery. Nothing matters, so let's have sex and wallow in our misery. It's the same logic that any addict knows well. Nothing matters, so let's get stoned/drunk/smoke. We may all die tomorrow, so there is no need to guard against the future.
2) Process Philosophy--or, everything is connected. And the parody of it's pop-culture, new-agey bite-sized expressions, as evidenced in the neo-60's detectives (played by ground-breaking late 60's actors) using a solitary EST personality destruction method to reinvent the star of the movie (ironically, to do exactly what he was doing before, but just be happier doing it).
It's great that this movie plays with these issues, which are philosophy 101, but don't take this for a deep movie just because it shoots the breeze with concepts that are mind-blowing to stoned thinkers who haven't taken/didn't pass their first logic class. The critics who liked the Matrix movies because they thought they were deep either liked this movie because of the philosophy, or hated it because of its lack of fu. On the other hand, fans of comedies might get tripped up by the talk of things that are hard to grok, and therefore not see the slapstick-sight-gag forest for the trees.
The reason this movie is great is not the philosophy, but the parody of the philosophers. To my mind, the characters play like facets of a modern person's personality. Watching Schwartzman sit in the tree while his meditation was hijacked by his hatred and confusion was more realistic of a modern worried mind than a pure comic abstraction. I mean, have you ever sat and tried to clear your mind of the latest stress item in your life?
The real genius of the movie is that it points to the many disparate images and ideas we hold, trying to sort them while we're being bombarded with more each minute. It is both red-state past-days pining (via Laura Ingalls Wilder), and blue state absurdist abstraction that leads to a model finding her true self by wearing a bonnet. How's that for a loaded representation of: 1) an idealized vision of a “pioneer woman”, bucking against modernity while struggling to eek out an honest living on a farm, and 2) a representation of women's oppression at the hands of white men in an era where women couldn't vote and were forced to wear stupidly modest clothing because of draconian religious mores--while being 3) completely absurd.
It's really no wonder that this movie flailed a bit--it's is a shell game of sorts. My suggestion, to those that didn't like it but maybe are inclined to try it again, is not to think too much. Let the movie wash over you and take it like a Charlie Kaufman film that might be playing absurdities just for the sake of absurdities. If you like it on that level alone, purely silly--I mean, the sight-gag of a modern art piece rubbing off on Hoffman's jacket? That's brilliant--then maybe it's worth exploring the idea that each character represents a part of a modern debate over values--not philosophy. I'll bet there is some meat on the bones, if somebody--perhaps somebody feeling a bit debauched because life is meaningless--spent some time looking closely at the traits and symbols of each character, we could probably unravel it all.
Now it makes sense why that asshole David O. Russel took five years to make this. Let's hope the next one is swifter.
Oh, and by the way, did anybody else notice that Dustin Hoffman's watch seemed to have no numbers and no hands?
Where we saw it: Movie Theater | We deign to rate it: 90 outta 100