David O Russell's I ♥ Huckabees: Talk All You Want - Page 2

David O. Russell, who directed and co-wrote the script with Jeff Baena, manages to blur the outlines of the genre a bit, or to convince himself he has. The hectically emotional Albert feels helpless in his battle against Brad (he thinks he should be able simply to point to Brad's smooth duplicity to convince people who the good guy is) and so, in a clever conceit, Albert ends up consulting some existential detectives (for a tangential reason that leads back to Brad) who spy on every aspect of his life in order to find out why he's so unhappy and confused. These detectives speak soothingly to their clients about how everything and everyone are part of everything and everyone else. Albert should see that he and Brad are connected. Frustrated because this doesn't give vent to his feelings, Albert turns to a glamorous Frenchwoman at the opposite end of the philosophical spectrum. She says that there's nothing you can do about the bad parts of life but endure them. She trains her disciples to habituate themselves to the inevitable return of the pain of consciousness by, among other techniques, letting themselves be hit in the face with a big rubber ball.

The interplay between these vewpoints has been the focus of the movie's marketing campaign and of the reviews. Both viewpoints are interesting and express how we feel at different times. But talk all they want, nothing the characters say alters the melodramatic mechanism: Brad is exposed as the Machiavellian he truly "is," rejected in turn by the group who apologize to Albert and say he was right all along, and brought low personally (Albert accidentally torches his house, which introduces Brad's wife to the fireman she'll leave him for).

In other words, Albert and Brad are not connected, and Brad's evil is not something Albert merely has to endure. (As a matter of dramatic structure if Russell and Baena wanted to bring out the connection between Albert and Brad then they should have made them plainly similar under their differences.) In the zoology of narrative aesthetics it's the skeleton of the plot not the metaphysical meat hanging on it that determines what kind of beast you're looking at. Russell and Baena would have to offer a far more searching exploration of narrative ideas for it to be otherwise. (Check out Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader's Taxi Driver (1976) for a movie that replicates its protagonist's melodramatic outlook without structuring the movie as melodrama.)

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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