Customer Ratings & Reviews

I went into "I (Heart) Huckabees" fearing that it would turn out to be nothing more than a second-rate, Charlie-Kaufman-wannabe journey into pointless weirdness-for-weirdness'-sake. I left the theater thinking it is one of the very best movies of the year. Any description of the "Huckabees" plot is guaranteed to make this film sound absurd, bizarre, convoluted and intellectually preposterous. All of which it is, but in a good way. Director/writer David O. Russell has created a thoroughly entertaining head trip that pretty much covers all that anyone could want to know about life, the universe and everything (as the saying goes). And the score by Jon Brion (who also did the honors for "Eternal Sunshine") is wonderful: simple, evocative, slightly offbeat and absolutely essential to the movie. Jason Schwartzman is an angry, disheveled environmentalist who is being squeezed out of his own "Open Spaces" organization by gladhanding slickee-boy Jude Law, who works within the Huckabees department store empire that is encroaching on a local marsh. Schwartzman enlists two "existential detectives" (Lily Tomlin and a fright-wigged Dustin Hoffman) to explain coincidences that he says are befalling him, and to make some sense of his rapidly deteriorating life. Meanwhile, firefighter Mark Wahlberg is having a crisis of faith over society's refusal to give up petroleum, and Huckabees spokesmodel Naomi Watts decides she wants to dress like an Amish woman in the company's TV ads. And then there is Isabelle Huppert, a nihilist French rival to Tomlin and Hoffman who has her own ideas about how to get people in touch with their personal realities...ideas which primarily involve getting hit in the face. If that paragraph hasn't scared you away from buying this DVD, you will be in for a genuine treat. "I (Heart) Huckabees" is brainy but ridiculous, and wacky fun that sometimes is actually moving. It is a genuine one-of-a-kind experience.