David O Russell's I ♥ Huckabees: Talk All You Want

I ♥ Huckabees should enter the structuralist textbooks to illustrate the precept that no matter what the characters in a movie talk about, the dramatic framework determines what the movie is about. Structurally I ♥ Huckabees is standard melodrama. In melodrama, to be brief, the purely good hero will be falsely accused, and then misjudged and rejected by the social group he's part of, and the totally evil villain will be unjustly ascendant, occupying the hero's rightful place until the hero can return to expose him, rough him up, often mortally, and publicly right the error as to who is truly good and who evil. (Click here for a fuller analysis of melodrama in my new book.) In I ♥ Huckabees the hero Albert (Jason Schwartzman) is an environmentalist, the villain Brad (Jude Law) a corporate executive at Huckabees chain department stores who wants to build on some marshland Albert is agitating to preserve. Brad joins the lobbying group Albert started, charms the membership and gets Albert ejected, all in order to subvert the group's mission. This melodramatic plot isn't how the movie's being sold but that's what they're selling.

The problem with melodrama is that it force-fits complex situations into its either/or mold. It doesn't diagram and assess the countervailing drives among the characters, or within each of them, but merely heightens the audience's automatic gut reaction to the instantly categorizable characters. (Nor does it question what constitutes good and evil.) Melodrama is enduringly popular precisely for these limitations: it offers the most extreme swings of emotion (from abject defeat to violent triumphalism) with the least mental processing required.

Thus, you go into I ♥ Huckabees already "knowing" that environmentalism is always better than corporate expansionism (though you aren't given enough information to judge whether preservation is the best use of this particular plot of land) and certainly preferring open and fair dealing with adversaries to its opposite (the underhandedness, of course, being all on Brad's side). Though we're meant to snigger at Albert's protest poetry and to see that he's whinily immature and lacks the finesse to communicate his ideals effectively, even to volunteers in his own organization, there's no real-world evaluation of the relative claims of environmentalism and corporate capitalism (which means the movie can't possibly bring people to environmentalism who aren't already there) and the values they reflect aren't analyzed or tested. In fact, the title, by associating the cloying iconic slogan with Brad's company rather than Albert's activism, tells you all you need to know (i.e., it wouldn't make sense to call the movie I ♥ Trees).

Article Author: Alan Dale

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies …

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