I Heart Huckabees
Winter 2005 Main series
Sunday, February 27, 2005 at 4:00pm
Sunday, February 27, 2005 at 7:00pm
Monday, February 28, 2005 at 7:00pm
Monday, February 28, 2005 at 9:30pm
Acadia Cinema's Al Whittle Theatre
450 Main Street, Wolfville, NS
Directed by
Starring
Rated 14A ·
1h 46m
United States
English
Moving effortlessly between the sublime and the ridiculous, jammed with mercilessly sharp dialogue and outlandish situations, David O. Russell’s (Three Kings, Flirting with Disaster) I Heart Huckabees confirms his status as a masterful director of the high-spirited farce and is his funniest film to date.
Earnest environmental activist and poet Albert Markovski (Jason Schwartzman, Rushmore) encounters a stranger three times and invests this coincidence with cosmic significance. His need to know the meaning of these encounters sets in motion an unlikely chain of events, beginning with a visit to the offices of Vivian and Bernard Jaffe (Lily Tomlin, Tea with Mussolini and Dustin Hoffman, The Graduate), a husband and wife team who run an existential detective agency. Their method — which involves twenty four hour, not so covert surveillance — will, they say, help Albert understand the coincidences that so confound him, but not before he examines his life, relationships and rivalries.
Albert’s main adversary is Brad Stand (Jude Law, Cold Mountain), an executive at Huckabees, a popular megastore that intends to build on the very land Albert is trying to protect. To annoy Albert, Brad hires Vivian and Bernard too, but soon their interference threatens to dismantle Brad’s perfect life — not to mention the sanity of Dawn (Naomi Watts, 21 Grams), his arm candy girlfriend.
Meanwhile, Albert befriends Tommy (Mark Wahlberg, Boogie Nights), a client of the detectives whose dissatisfaction with their feel good method has led him to dabble in the theories of the French nihilist Caterine Vauban (Isabelle Huppert, 8 Femmes) — the Jaffes’ arch nemesis. When both Albert and Tommy fall under her influence, all hilarious hell breaks loose.
A Gala Presentation at the 2004 Toronto International Film Festival, I Heart Huckabees is an absurdist comedy with an all-star cast that reveals some hilarious truths about reality. Like an essay by a philosophy student trapped between Simone de Beauvoir and Irma Bombeck, Russell’s film takes us through an adventure replete with existential crises, ruminations on pure being and the highs and lows of self discovery.