I ♥ Huckabees (2004)

I Heart Huckabees arrived in 2004, a year when a philosophical comedy could still be greenlit on the strength of a director's dream about a metaphysical detective agency. David O. Russell assembled Dustin Hoffman, Lily Tomlin, Jude Law, Jason Schwartzman, Mark Wahlberg, Naomi Watts and Isabelle Huppert, then handed them a screenplay in which the plot is largely an excuse for arguments about the nature of the universe. The nominal conflict sets an environmental coalition against a big-box retailer, which supplies the film with a usable crusade and a steady supply of contempt for consumerism. The marshland is worth saving. The store is a hollow monument to acquisitiveness. The movie does not pretend otherwise.

Where the film works hardest is in its talk. Bernard and Vivian Jaffe peddle universal interconnectivity. Caterine Vauban counters with a cheerful nihilism, and the clients ricochet between the two positions for ninety minutes. The dialogue is dense, abstract, and relentless, a seminar with a soundtrack. Tomlin and Huppert give the sermonizing a sharp edge, and Watts gets to abandon the modeling industry for something she hopes is real, a gesture toward autonomy the script never develops into a thesis. Wahlberg's fireman, furious about petroleum, carries the ecological grievance like a man holding a live wire.

What the film does not contain is just as legible. Race goes unmentioned. Queerness is absent. No character is diagnosed, accommodated, or labeled. History is not revised, because history is not the subject. This is a pre-2010 comedy of ideas, and its politics are the older, scattershot kind: suspicious of corporations, fond of trees, indifferent to the categories that would later organize such suspicion into a program. It failed at the box office, which seems fitting. A film this committed to talking itself in circles was never going to become a franchise.