David O Russell's I ♥ Huckabees: Talk All You Want - Page 3

On the plus side, Russell plays it all for comedy, with a large, talented cast (including Naomi Watts, Lily Tomlin, Dustin Hoffman, Isabelle Huppert, and Talia Shire) making the most of the syncopated dialogue. Despite the prankish tone, however, Mark Wahlberg made the strongest impression on me in a scene in which his character treats Brad dismissively at a party. In movies Wahlberg usually blands himself out with amiability, as if he were trying to erase our memories of his career as a rap fake and eye-popping underwear model. This is the first time I've seen him play into his competitive masculine confidence and it's very potent. It's like a blip from a great, naturalistic performance in a completely different movie (though not last year's The Italian Job which could have used some of this very kind of potency).

For the most part, however, I ♥ Huckabees is itself amiable, and bouncy, but also fairly pat. Not surprisingly, since melodrama is an indestructible, streamlined vehicle for conveying complacent yet excitable emotions. It has no use for thoughts beyond ornamentation, however much Russell may talk in this interview with Looking Closer about the ideas driving the movie. So even the fact that the existential concepts speak to my experience hasn't left as strong an impression as the way Russell, son of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, has enhanced the melodrama with ethnic stereotypes: Albert the moral and emotional Jewish man outweaseled by the Brad the two-faced WASPy-blond who cares only about money and status. (It's like an inversion of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.) Even worse is a shameful sequence in which a family of fundamentalist Christians who have adopted an African man are shown up as screeching hypocrites. The sequence, poorly written and played, didn't convince me Russell has the experience to get this schematic shouting match right. It feels sloppily prejudicial. (The Looking Closer interview contains some of Russell's ideas about religion, and, to his credit, he is somewhat abashed by his portrayal of the Christian family.)

You might expect environmentalists to be too rational to fancy seeing their issues reduced to the trumped-up dynamics of melodrama. Unfortunately that's probably giving them too much credit, and at any rate they're entitled to their simplistic, self-gratifying melodramas alongside everybody else in the entire friggin' world. And I ♥ Huckabees isn't nearly as painful as Neil Young's Greendale (2003), a dotardly video companion to his album of the same name, about a young girl named Sun Green taking up environmentalism as a heroic quest. Halfway through Greendale my otherwise good-natured boyfriend turned to me and said, "You owe me big time," and that was well before Sun "chained herself to a statue of an eagle/In the lobby of Power Co./And started yellin' through a megaphone,/'There's corruption on the highest floor'," or exhorted us anthemically to "Be the rain!" (When I wasn't numb with stupefaction during Greendale I was embarrassed--surely Neil Young has had enough leisure to develop greater political and literary sophistication.) Neither is I ♥ Huckabees inherently worthless like that virgin-acrylic eco-disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow. (Click here for my review.) But don't be decoyed by the bright-undergrad play of notions in I ♥ Huckabees; keep your eye on the hand the magician isn't waving around. In the end Russell hasn't pushed self-examination significantly farther than Greendale or The Day After Tomorrow, the least and most advanced of entertainment products, respectively.

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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