2004 - I HEART HUCKABEES, so called existential comedy missing the comedy part.

 Looking at the career of David O Russell for a few moments.  Russell was an independent filmmaker who achieved critical notice with his "incest comedy," Spanking the Monkey, he followed this up with another quirky comedy about adoption called Flirting with Disaster.  Both these films achieved decent reviews and more importantly made money since that's about the only thing they care about in the movie business.  Russell was able to get financing for his Iraq war film Three Kings. The film had big time Hollywood star George Clooney, Ice Cube and Mark Wahlberg.  Another critical and financial success.  But the signs that all was not well in movie land were beginning to show.  Russell was apparently under some pressure with a studio financed film and found himself in conflict with Clooney over his treatment of the film crew.  Still in Hollywood a money making film is a money making film which allowed him to obtain financing for this film.

Apparently Russell had a lot of big thoughts running around in his head so he decided to share them with the movie audience.  Russell wrote a screenplay about an environmentalist  in a life threatening crisis who hires a team of "existential detectives."  They follow him around and at the same time the environmentalist is also followed by a French woman who is a nihilist.  I actually had to look this stuff up on the internet to understand it.  The film spends a lot of time with endless philosophical discussions about these two points of view while working in quirky comedy bits.  This is just the kind of stuff a paying audience want to see when they go out to a movie.

 

The screenplay is a complete head scratcher for me but it attracted a very good cast, Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin are the existential detectives.  Isabelle Huppert is the nihilist, Jude Law, Jason Schwartzman and Naomi Watts show up. Mark Wahlberg is a philosophy spewing fireman who hits people in the face with a pan or something is in it.  But it should be mentioned that a pattern of fighting with the actors during production was beginning to reoccur.

 

The film to put it mildly is what happens when a pretentious artistic director is allowed to run amok.  I'm not sure what Russell or the producers expected from this film but it's safe to say Russell didn't work for six years after this.  Since this film Russell has been involved with more commercial projects, a fight movie, a love story etc.

The screenplay was by David O. Russell and Jeff Baena, the running time is 106 minues of a "fundamental search for truth."