two emily thumbs up

I watched a most absurd movie last night but it made me laugh pretty hard at some moments. As I’m naturally stringent about doling out cheap laughs, I think anything that actually succeeds in amusing or making me laugh, invariably impresses even myself.

The film in question is I heart Huckabees. As I look back now, I don’t really understand the title. It’ s just random and gimmicky and designed to be a bit offbeat. Other than that, it doesn’t seem to have any special pertinence in the film. Anyone who has seen the film and can offer a more cogent interpretation of the title is welcome to correct me on this.

The movie is about a pair of oddball husband and wife detectives, detectives who are out to solve cases of existential crises, not the usual murder-she-wrote variety. Dustin Hoffman with a Beatles mop for hair did a hilarious turn as the husband of the team, paired with his wonderfully sublime wife, played by Lily Tomlin. As “detective”, she walks around in a 1940’s prim business suit, complete with high heels, doffed with cotton white gloves to fish through garbage cans and spy on people. It’s a comedy deliberately going out on a ledge.

I thought Mark Wahlberg, as the fireman, obsessed with how uncaring the world is about the usage of petroleum was great. He was full of anger, but also childish petulance. He was paired with a wimpy poet and activist Markovsky and eventually tried to sway him to another philosophy about life, into a philosophy of the more nihilistic variety.

So this movie is about people obsessed with finding out what the meaning of life is. The film ultimately doesn’t really tell you, per se, what the meaning of life is, but it does strongly imply what it believes life NOT to be. For instance, Jude Law, sexy and sleazy as ever, plays a charming, slick and ambitious sales executive who ends up having his world turned upside down. His girlfriend plays a pretty girl who suddenly loses all confidence in an identity built on looks and tries to uglify herself.

I heart huckabees is a film about lost people who need to find themselves. It’s also about lost people who don’t even know they are lost. It’s also about loopy people who on the one hand, indulges in their wildest imaginations about what life is all about, and on the other hand, need to reconcile their place in the objective, “harsh” reality of life. Maybe I see my own loopiness reflected in the film, and that’s why it resonated so strongly with me. All I can say is: I heart I heart Huckabees!