Movie Review: I Heart Huckabees
Three years ago, I wrote “if a plot-segment has to jump out and grab the audience by the throat and scream “Look at me! I’m a moral dilemma!”, it is probably not much of one.”
“I Heart Huckabees” begins by introducing a man gripped by existential crisis. He seeks the services of an existential detective, and soon gets wrapped up with several other people on intertwining journeys of self-discovery. There were some memorable characters, and parts where I laughed out loud, but overall I found the movie quite disappointing.
The movie pokes fun at western philosophy and modern therapy, but in a rather obvious and gratuitous way. The sequence of scenes touches on each of the big debates of existentialism as if the screen writer has just finished reading his undergraduate textbook and is writing a scene per chapter. “Everything Matters”, “Nothing Matters”, presented in exactly this juxtaposition, as if the viewer would be too stupid to figure this out if it were any more subtle. Every single such irony is paraded nakedly and beat in until you can be sure that nobody in the audience will miss the profundity.
The best stories hide their themes inside a plot that is equally enjoyable to people with or without sensitivity to the theme.Stoppard’s “The Real Inspector Hound”, is a perfect example of this. Stoppard’s play also pokes fun at existentialist crises in the context of a detective story, and would probably be enjoyable to the people who hated “I heart huckabees”.