I Heart Huckabees

Year: 2004 Rating: R Overall Evaluation: 5.0 Significance Suppositions Story Style 6.0 / 10 7.0 / 10 5.0 / 10 4.0 / 10 Click HERE for evaluation criteria.

Style

Rated R for language and a (non-nude but pretty crude) sex scene. Both the sex scene and the spastic cussing scenes are entirely gratuitous and and only useful as crude comic material.

Story

This "existential comedy" features a man who hires an existential detective agency to investigate an odd coincidence in his life that he feels is somehow the key to something looming over his life. He is joined by a man whose wife has left him due to his maniacal philosophical / sociological ramblings. The two try to figure life out through a variety of bizarre treatments (such as hitting each other in the face with a large rubber ball or being zipped into a body bag). At the same time a competing philosopher is vying for their attention. Things go from bad to worse as the detectives and their competitor confuse the two men more and more.

Suppositions

This film pits two competing ideologies against one another and it is fairly interesting to watch the two men attempt to live them out. The detectives are a mix of New Age mysticism and philosophical monism (they believe that all is one and it is our inability to recognize that fact that causes conflict). Their competition is a nihilist/atomist (believing that the universe is completely disconnected, all is random, and so conflict is caused by our doomed attempt to make sense out of the world). The detectives want their clients to meditate on the oneness of all things and seek peace, whereas their adversary urges them to simply seek pleasure and power so as to dominate their environment and bend it to their own wills.

[SPOILER ALERT]

In the end the "hero" decides that both sides have points to them but it is their competitiveness that has divided them to the point that each side has taken what they think is true too far and excluded all truth from the other.

As far as it goes this is not too bad, but no real answer is suggested other than a vague composition of two extreme views. Neither view can hold up of course - both Monism and Atomism fail to explain the data of reality and end up in contradictions. Christianity is portrayed as ignorant and non-philosophical which is a joke because it was a Christian (Thomas Aquinas) who solved the problem of the one and the many that both Monism and Atomism were born out of.

Significance

Other than "don't listen to whacky philosophers" there isn't very much more to this film. It seems that the writer may be wanting us to conclude that we're all floating around out there trying to find ourselves and no one can really tell anyone else what is true - but it's fun to keep looking. Since the film really only implies this, and uses perfectly good examples of bad philosophy as its delivery method, it's not terribly bad - just not terribly useful either.