[Heart] story

The love object in David O. Russell’s “I [Heart] Huckabees” -- or the “heart” object, anyway -- is a mighty chain of superstores whose down-homeyness masks a rapacious imperialist streak. Huckabees builds where it wants to, when it wants to. This time it has its sights set on some marshland, which Albert Markovski (Jason Schwartzman), the leader of a tiny nonprofit environmental coalition and pesky flea on the nape of the Huckabees corporation, is valiantly trying to save. Mostly through poetry.

Albert, who has succeeded in protecting a largish rock from Huckabees’ bulldozers, enters the movie swearing. We learn that during a fancy dinner meeting with Brad Stand (Jude Law), the ingratiating and impossibly gorgeous public face of Huckabees, the dazzled Albert lost his moorings. All it took was Brad plying him with anecdotes about Jet Skiing with Dawn (Naomi Watts), a gyrating corporate model-mascot better known as Ms. Huckabees, who is also Brad’s girlfriend, for Albert to cave to an alliance. Albert’s shame bottoms out when he recalls himself happily accepting an “I [Heart] Huckabees” button.

“Huckabees,” billed as “an existential comedy,” is an exuberant and often poignant meditation on what it means to be alive at a time when life seems to be locked in an ongoing grudge match with its dumb-but-attractive rival, lifestyle -- life is full of pain and contradiction, but lifestyle has all the shiny accessories, so it usually wins.

Directed by Russell and boasting a superb cast, the movie is undeniably weird, though it’s hardly what you’d call “experimental.” My hunch is that whether you love it or reject it as obtuse, incoherent or self-involved will be a generational thing. “Huckabees” assumes that we live in tryingly bogus times, in which reality is easily buried under layers of hucksterism, and that thinking people -- especially those who went to college in the ‘80s or after -- automatically look at the world as a “text.” The movie takes for granted that talking about our constructed reality requires going beyond the limits of realism. It’s like early Woody Allen, but for the semiotics generation.

The homey-yet-hip Huckabees has been compared with Wal-Mart, but it’s a dead ringer for that store’s graphically sophisticated, impossibly self-aware archrival, Target. With its pop sensibility and its hip-tacular ads, Huckabees knows how to flatter the same “upscale” American psyche that once rejected its type of retailer and can even, the movie suggests, divest people of their core beliefs. A Huckabees executive nails the phenomenon when, praising Brad for single-handedly converting their new environmental celebrity spokesperson Shania Twain to chicken salad, which she used to hate, he says, “She didn’t vomit! He made her change her mind. And that’s what they want up in corporate.” It’s no accident that it calls itself “the everything store.” Not only does it sell tops and mops and flags and bags, it promises patriotic sentiment (“Oh say, can you see ... how good this looks?” its sexy spokesmodel pouts and winks in one commercial, dressed like a stripper version of Uncle Sam) and even love on a lapel button. In fact, you could spend your entire life and never venture outside the boundaries of Huckabees-sanctioned values. So what’s not to heart?

That, of course, is the big question that propels Albert forward. Angry, depressed and on the verge of losing his job, Albert engages the services of a couple of “existential detectives,” Bernard and Vivian Jaffe (Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin), to help him make sense of what’s happening to him. In particular, he wants to understand the meaning of a bizarre coincidence, three seemingly unrelated encounters with the same African stranger, which he is convinced holds the key to something big.

Vivian and Bernard espouse an Eastern philosophy of universal interconnectedness, which Bernard likes to explain by draping a blanket over his fists and moving them around. “This is me ... and this is you, over here this is Vivian, and this is the Eiffel Tower! Paris! This is a war and this is a disease and this is an orgasm and this is a hamburger.”

“So everything is the same even though it’s different,” Albert concludes.

As if to prove that point as spuriously as possible, Brad hires the Jaffes too and immediately starts writing poems and generally co-opting Albert’s interests and tastes.

Increasingly dissatisfied with the detectives, Albert befriends their client Tommy Corn (Mark Wahlberg), a firefighter who equates petroleum use with murder. Tommy has discovered the sultry French nihilist and Bernard and Vivian apostate, Caterine Vauban (Isabelle Huppert), who believes that the universe is meaningless and cruel. Together, the three of them take a break from trying to make sense of it all. In one of the film’s funniest scenes, Vauban has Tommy and Albert bash each other in the head with medicine balls to stop thinking. “Don’t call it ‘the ball thing,’ ” Vauban pouts. “Call it pure being.”

Schwartzman and Law are pitch-perfect in their roles as dueling poster boys for a transcendent existence versus a materially rich life (they play off each other like jealous siblings), as is Watts as the insecure pretty girl who pretends to hate being an object of admiration. Hoffman’s Bernard calls to mind “The Graduate’s” Benjamin Braddock in his twilight years, and Jon Brion’s beautiful, sad-funny score only underscores the connection. The performances are all strong, but Wahlberg, raw, vulnerable and tragicomic, is the movie’s revelation.

As it happens, the tall African man turns out to be an orphaned Sudanese refugee who has been adopted by a white suburban family. “Steve,” as he’s been rechristened by his conservative Christian parents, invites Tommy and Albert over for dinner, and the conversation soon turns into an ideological brawl. Steve’s adoptive dad, an engineer, thinks the Sudan could use some suburban sprawl, while Tommy blames the SUV parked in the driveway for Steve’s refugee status. Albert and Tommy leave in a huff. But before that happens, Steve’s sister turns to her mother in a minor panic. “We don’t have to ask ourselves those kinds of questions, do we, Mom?”

And Mom has the easy answer: “No, honey.”

“Huckabees” is Russell’s fourth movie, and it feels like the culmination of something he’s been talking about for a long time -- from 1994’s “Spanking the Monkey” (which not for nothing sported the tag line “Get a Grip on Yourself”), in which the protagonist literally tries to crawl back into the womb by sleeping with his mother; to “Flirting With Disaster” (1996), in which the protagonist is so neurotically unsure of who he is, he can’t name his newborn until he finds his birth parents; to 1999’s “Three Kings,” in which three Gulf War soldiers come unexpectedly face to face with the results of the first Bush administration’s foray into Iraq. For 10 years, Russell has been asking the same questions: What happens to your identity when you align yourself to a country, a corporation or a cause? Is everything -- including the car you drive and the plight of a Sudanese orphan -- connected? Or is life a meaningless jumble of manipulation, cruelty and pain? As with any philosopher, he doesn’t have the answer, but he shows that asking the questions can lift some of the dread of existence.

*

‘I [Heart] Huckabees’

MPAA rating: R for language and a sex scene

Times guidelines: Lots of heartfelt swearing, sex in the mud

Jason Schwartzman...Albert Markovski

Jude Law...Brad Stand

Naomi Watts... Dawn Campbell

Isabelle Huppert...Caterine Vauban

Dustin Hoffman...Bernard Jaffe

Lily Tomlin...Vivian Jaffe

Fox Searchlight Pictures Presents in association with Qwerty Films a Kanzeon/Scott Rudin/N1 European Films Produktions production, released by Fox Searchlight. Director David O. Russell. Producers David O. Russell, Gregory Goodman, Scott Rudin. Executive producer Michael Kuhn. Written by David O. Russell and Jeff Baena. Director of photography Peter Deming. Editor Robert K. Lambert. Production designer K.K. Barrett. Costume designer Mark Bridges. Music Jon Brion. Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes

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