While I ♥ Huckabees opened in limited theaters last weekend I held on to my review so that I wouldn’t publish my thoughts on the film until I got a chance to speak with the man behind the madness, David O. Russell. Maybe best known for his 1999 film Three Kings, which starred Mark Wahlberg, George Clooney and Ice Cube Huckabees continues in the tradition of metaphor as there is a lot to look for and if you aren’t careful you just might miss the whole point of the film.
Whereas in Three Kings the quest was for ‘gold’, here in Huckabees the metaphorical gold could be considered the search for the meaning of life, or maybe more appropriate the meaning of existence. In a movie described as “An Existential Comedy” my first notion when sitting down with director/co-writer David O. Russell was not to ask him the obvious questions about the color palette of the film, or how it was to work with such a stellar cast of names, which by the way include Dustin Hoffman, Lily Tomlin, Jason Schwartzman, Mark Wahlberg, Jude Law and Naomi Watts, but I wanted to try and figure out just what all this meant, and not how should I translate it, but how does he translate it.
If you are like me the name is the first thing to catch your eye and, yes, the ‘♥’ is actually in the title of the film and it is supposed to be. Why? Russell says, “For one thing because I like having a heart in the title, I like a picture of a heart and for another I like anything that shakes up your stable way of using your brain or your language. Third, if it annoys people I don’t really care.”
This is indicative of everything you will get from Huckabees, an I don’t care attitude and a movie that will shake you up, shake you down, or simply have you leaving the theater saying, “What the hell did I just watch?” Then again, what exactly is this movie about?
I asked the question and his first response was simply to give me a description of the film that he would use to pitch it to a studio, “Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin are existential detectives who you would hire to investigate the meaning of your life right now and their clients include Jason Schwartzman, Mark Wahlberg, Jude Law, Naomi Watts… their nemesis is Isabelle Huppert… hilarity ensues.” Obviously this wasn’t the answer I was looking for so I probed further to try and get an idea of just what exactly these existential detectives do as if Russell, himself, were setting up an agency.
“Well, we’re gonna do two things, it is a two pronged approach. We’re going to have complete access, with your approval, to your life. We will follow you into all aspects of your life and we’ll share with you what insights we have about your life. So we are going to follow you everywhere. The other prong is that we will challenge your understanding of what reality is.
“Do you think reality is just this right here? You’re sitting in a chair and you got a crew cut and I am holding a tape recorder, and you’re 6’6” and I’m not?
“Then, we are going to challenge you and talk to you about subatomic quantum particles that actually you can’t tell the difference between my chair and your foot and what does that mean? How does that affect your understanding of actually, what is? Things may be quite different from what they actually are and that can happen in any spiritual traditional interest physics.”
Subatomic quantum particles? If you are completely with him then congrats, but there are a couple scenes in this movie that still had me going, “Huh?” So I wanted more.
Inside the movie Jason Schwartzman’s character begin asking himself questions, “What is this experience we are having?” “What is this? What does this mean? What is this going toward?” and I wanted to know if these were questions Russell asks of himself and if so was he asking them even as I was interviewing him?
“I think it is a good thing to do, and I do like doing it, and you just reminded me to do it again, which is why it is fun to do this movie because I really ended up talking about it, and instead of me being here [in this interview] on auto pilot you just reminded me to directly access it.
“I think people thought about these things for about five minutes after 9/11 and then, like Mark Wahlberg’s character says in the movie, ‘Why is it that people only ask themselves deep questions after something really bad happens and then they shortly thereafter forget about it?’ For me, it’s been great to not do it just when something bad happens, I like that you just reminded me of that.”
I finally felt I was getting somewhere, and this question seemed to open him up to talk more about his experience with these questions and just might get us to the underlying meaning of the movie.
“I am just happy you reminded me of these things because some part of me is thinking how is this going? Does this guy like the film? Is this gonna help the film? I’m tired… blah, blah, blah …. Then you remind me of that question and all of a sudden it’s just like this moment is completely open and infinite and liberated, and for me to experience that right now actually makes me feel better.”
Just from that, after seeing the film, I knew this movie was a very personal tour for Russell and to go further into that was certain to find me the keys to unlock this movie. So I asked, “It seems there is a lot more of you in this film than in any other film that you could have made. Is that true?”
“Absolutely true. It’s very personal to me, I knew after Three Kings I wanted to make a more personal movie and that’s me, Schwartzman, I was an activist in my 20s and I didn’t get into making films until I was 30. The friendship Schwartzman has with Mark Wahlberg is my friendship with Mark Wahlberg. I am the middle class guy that went to college, he’s the poor guy who went to jail and we’re very different and it’s a relationship that tickles me, and the ideas in the movie are the ideas that I have studied with Robert Thurman who is the head of the department of religion at Columbia and was my teacher in college, at a different college, and ideas I have been into for 20 years.
“My feelings about 9/11 are in the Mark Wahlberg character, that’s personal. I studied Zen for four years a lot of that is in the Isabelle Huppert character and the Tibetan stuff is more in the detectives.”
Hmmmmm… now we are getting into the guts of this whole ‘existential’ thing, where the philosophy lies, and just like all the philosophical questions Huckabees conjures up I was curious just how often Russell asks himself these questions, considering just how deep they truly are. My thought is that someone could ultimately go insane wondering about each and every situation they are put in, and trying to figure out the nature of existence, but when I asked Russell this he let me know my sanity was not in any danger.
“That’s what is beautiful about [these questions] and I don’t think it would make you go insane, actually I think that it makes you go sane because the first thing you understand about these questions is that they are not answerable except in the way that you would live them. I think what makes you go insane is that you have to have a view of reality one way or another and you’re culturally given one, that can make you go insane. If you just think your life is nothing but your job, or what you buy.”
So I had to throw in, “Sort of the Fight Club scenario?”
“Sort of, sure I’ll take that.”
This was were the tag-team came in as Russell’s co-writer, Jeff Baena, on I ♥ Huckabees came in and Russell introduced him while laughing, “This is Jeff, who co-wrote the movie with me, and has a good sweet case of bed-head. Lucky bastard got to sleep an extra two hours after me, but that’s why I get paid the big bucks.”
Jeff, though, added a bit to the insanity, much to David’s approval, “I think one of the conditions of insanity is not questioning your sanity, so by not questioning things you are insane.”
David smiles, “Slam, you came up with the tomahawk jam! He’s not buying it though…”
He wasn’t exactly right, I wasn’t looking to be convinced, I was looking for the answers that would solve the riddle that is I ♥ Huckabees. So I asked, “So what exactly should we be questioning, what is most important? Like questioning this chair here can’t be all that important…?”
Russell said, “More important? Actually I think that is pretty important, these questions are portals, they’re points of departure for your brain to leave its habitual place, but you have to use the habitual mind, it helps you navigate. Your ego is very good at controlling things and saying, I understand this, I control it, that is what your ego is designed to do, so that is good. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have a job, or eat, or you would shit in your pants and a lot of bad things would happen if your ego didn’t do that. So that is some level of not questioning.
“However when you get drunk, or do drugs, or you have sex that area gets a little grey, sometimes you do shit in your pants or sometimes you do, you do…”
At this point we are all just laughing like crazy and David goes on, “…Sometimes it’s true! Sometimes that area gets a little bit shaken up, and that’s liberating, it’s a good thing.”
Now before I go on with the rest of what he said, I honestly think, this past comment is the crux of the story, this is what the whole movie was about for me personally and it really opened my eyes and cleared up a lot of loose ends and answered some of the crazier scenes in the film. Adding to that the rest of his answer also adds a lot more light.
“It’s good your ego controls life that way, it’s useful, but if that’s it, that’s all it is, I think you’re missing out, and you can get really stressed out. Your life becomes subject to you thinking life is what I buy, or what I eat, or the real religion in America of In Style magazine. Whereas I think it’s good to sometimes have points of departure.”
To get his point across he refers to an infomercial they did for the movie with Dustin Hoffman, Lily Tomlin, Robert Thurman (chair of Religion at Columbia University) and Joe Rudnick (chair of Physics and Astronomy at UCLA). Out of everything that he described from the infomercial the best probably came from a quote from Rudnick saying, “Regarding abstract art and the 10 dimensions [a much longer story], people like what’s comfortable, they don’t like things that make them stretch. If you have to stretch your body it is going to feel uncomfortable.”
David built on this, “All I am saying is that it is good to stretch, it’s good to try to push yourself a little bit and talking about the tenth dimension or talking about infinity is, to me, a very useful thing, it relaxes me, it makes me feel more alive. The people that do this are my heroes, I think you have to be a hero to get beyond the conventional shit on a daily basis because it is uncomfortable.
So, you may be asking now, like I was, “When does it stop and when does it start? When do you think people can find a perfect balance in their life regarding these things?”
“I think everybody has to decide that for themselves. If I was running around like Jim Morrison, then you could say that’s out of balance. I think if it makes you more open and more relaxed then that is a good thing, ultimately. More open to more people and less uptight about yourself, that’s a good thing.”
The tagline for this movie is “An Existential Comedy” but what Russell is describing is very serious stuff, life changing stuff, so I had to wonder just where the comedy comes in, and out of everything David said there was one thing that seemed to answer it very well for me.
“A Zen monk once said to me, ‘If you’re not laughing you’re not getting it,’ it meaning the whole thing. The humor is the substance in its most sublime form.”
Not only did this help to sum up the whole interview for me, it is also why I thought his earlier comment about shitting your pants is so relevant in describing certain parts of I ♥ Huckabees.
After talking with David my opinion on the movie changed and I feel like I found a little more meaning in it, and hopefully it will help you as well if you go check it out. When I asked him what he hoped people took away from the film he said, “I like people to take away from this film some feeling of elation and you get some thoughtfulness or wondering. That is my favorite reaction. If you don’t catch everything that’s fine.
“I have watched this movie in 10 cities with 10 different audiences and I can’t quantify it but I can say that I had to make this movie because it is close to my heart. I am not going to tell you this is going to be the biggest fucking hit in America, I don’t really care.
“I think that if people hear that something is smart and funny and different then there are enough people that may want to go see it and a large percentage of audiences that I have seen have been elated by the film and then have some sort of thoughtfulness and that’s all I can hope for.”
I ♥ Huckabees is in theaters everywhere now.
