Before seeing I Heart Huckabees, I was getting ready to group David O. Russell together with Wes Anderson, P.T. Anderson, and Alexander Payne as part of a modern cadre of filmmakers with similar sensibilities and an innate knowledge of how to meld organic comic moments with an embracing humanism. But in contrast to the Andersons, he doesn’t wear his compassion on his sleeve, and unlike Payne, who mutated the scathing satire of Citizen Ruth and Election into the pathetically funny empathy of About Schmidt, Russell doesn’t allow for enough emotional extrapolation in I Heart Huckabees to quite warrant admission into their upper echelons. In his previous films—Spanking the Monkey, Flirting with Disaster, and Three Kings —he has proven an adeptness with an acerbic brand of humor which often provokes enlightenment, but this time out, in a movie which plays with blatant philosophical musings, the lack of further expansion into more sincere realms of feeling leaves one with a sense of floundering and nowhere to go.

The tone is set by the opening-credits images of Albert Markovski, played by Jason Schwartzman—who looks and sounds strikingly like the Tom Cruise of an inverted geek world—cursing in his head prior to dedicating a poem to the rock he has saved from a marsh, setting off for a nondescript office building, circling its sterile hallways as he tries to find his way to an appointment. The glaring off-white of the surroundings are emblematic of the pointedly generic urban spaces the characters inhabit throughout the movie, with people and paintings providing the only spots of color against the blankness. It’s a promising start and, at first, I was laughing almost ahead of the jokes, so hotly was I anticipating them from the trailer, designed as it was with curiosity-piquing anarchy. It’s certainly amusing for a while to watch existential detectives Vivian and Bernard Jaffe (Lily Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman) lurk around, conspicuously covert as they spy on Albert’s daily routines, having been hired by him to illuminate the significance of a series of coincidences. Ignoring protestations that he wants to isolate the depth of their investigation to contain only the three instances of running into the “African man” he describes, they branch out into a canvassing of his day-to-day reality in order to uncover his most intensely-felt philosophical issues. This includes surveying, much to his chagrin, his routines of self-righteous indignation tied to meetings with Huckabees (a K-/Wal-/Tar-Mart concoction) as the corporation attempts to co-opt the Open Spaces Coalition to Stop Suburban Sprawl that Albert has chartered. Soon disenchanted with the odd couple, who endlessly expound on the interconnections of everything, Albert is lead astray by the competing teachings of nihilistic French author Caterine Vauban, embodied by Isabelle Huppert (her presence animating the awkwardness of some of the film’s stabs at absurdism, as she seems completely incongruous, and not intentionally), who lends her status as detached, intellectual/sexual cinematic icon to the project. Her business card aptly reads: “Cruelty, manipulation, meaninglessness.”

Taking a page from the detectives’ client roster to help him wade through the existential muck, Albert meets his designated “other,” Tommy Corn (Mark Wahlberg), a support-group partner who helps him deal with the new emotions surfacing as a result of the “dismantling” process he’s undergoing. While Mark Wahlberg always has struck me a normal guy well-cast as such rather than as an actor, in his role here as a firefighter traumatized by the “September thing,” he fills his unstrung kook’s rantings with an energetic grace. Tommy’s acute fixation on the overzealous consumption of petroleum in America, his conscientious bicycling and aggressive accusations at virtually everyone who crosses his path, give birth to some of the film’s most hilarious sequences. The only problem with this is that his character rarely becomes more than a jokey mouthpiece; you aspire for him to be more sympathetically drawn.

Similarly, Dawn (thanks largely to the reliably sublime Naomi Watts) morphs from Huckabees sweetHeart spokesmodel into bonnet-wearing, makeup-free waif. She desires to live more authentically and without all the pretty-girl accoutrements, and as she progresses in this vein, we catch flickerings of the deeper feelings beneath the film’s slick surface. There is something captivating about the inability of these characters, divorced from their former insulation, to readjust to the chatter of normalcy after their awakening to a larger sense of the universe. Yet the absence of any real profundity in I Heart Huckabees, filled as it is with the new-age vibe of admonishments like “Sadness is what you are, don’t deny it,” and “Where is your pure being now, Tommy?” makes it difficult to take these transformations seriously.

Such abstract ruminations spewed forth by the characters initially trigger instantaneous and mirthful laughter, but the dialogue soon becomes too one-note in its tongue-in-cheekiness. In this film about meaning, shrewd nonsensicality devolves quickly into, well, meaninglessness. Russell’s characters seem lost within the framework of a script more than in the baffling patterns of the universe; this time, his comedy excavates less truth than usual, and there is a gimmickry, a glibness that never truly revealed itself in his work until now- this is most apparent in the digital effects sometimes employed to render the fragmentation of the characters or Albert’s imaginings, which seem forced, as if the director feels the need to burn the extra money a star cast entails.

Ultimately, and ironically, what’s missing in I Heart Huckabees is love. Russell, much as you sense he wants to, doesn’t demonstrate enough warmth towards his madcap creatures, and so, rather than blooming into humans, they remain caricatures. Their constant self-aware winking ensures that, rather than being lured inwards and closer to them, we remain at a distance. Their personal failings and tragedies aren’t treated with the proper gravity, and so a disconnect arises from the fact that we want to care about these people, but can’t—we haven’t been given enough to go on. In a work with a literal Heart in its title, you would suspect honest sentiment would be in greater evidence, until you realize that the Heart is meant sarcastically, commenting upon that symbol’s newly re-energized commodification and heavy utilization following the popularity of I Heart NY memorabilia after 9/11.

The only genuine moment in the movie transpires when the immaculately beautiful Brad Stand (Jude Law, who once again finds himself the articulation of perfection, and, in his incarnation as charming, good-looking, BMW SUV-driving, big shot Huckabees executive, comes to stand in for everything Albert despises) crumples in humiliated tears, and is captured on polaroid by Caterine. For the first time, as he bears witness to his arch-enemy’s lowest moment, Albert feels connected to Brad in his pained humanity. It’s a small taste of what’s missing.

In the end, rather than multiplying outwards, Russell’s ideas find themselves compressed into the simplistic somethingness/nothingness dichotomy which constantly crops up, intoned over parts of the soundtrack, leaving me to question I Heart Huckabees on the same grounds. Indicative of somethingness? Of nothingness? Is it possible the movie set out to evoke a cinematic response in the spectator to mimic the characters’ internal quandaries? Much as I hate to say it, leaving the theater, I was left more with a sense of emptiness.
—KRISTI MITSUDA