American Soul, Aisle Five
WHAT CONNECTS I Heart Huckabees to the year's other headiest movies, The Passion of the Christ and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? It's the quest for belief and knowing that director David O. Russell analyzes against all the prevailing agnostic pop trends. This pursuit doesn't come out of nowhere; it follows the fundamental philosophical issues that reviews of the latter two movies never mentioned (neither do the ads for Huckabees, which reduce the movie to a zany romp). Bravo to Russell for sizing up how desperately we run around, professing principles, oblivious of others, all the while trying to block out a spiritual hollowness.
Yet the hectic, hellzapoppin' I Heart Huckabees might be too hysterical for its own good. Still, a genuinely wild movie is a rare thing, and at least this one is apoplectic about the modern condition-rather than being a careless indulgence. The central character Albert Markovski's (Jason Schwartzman) opening narration-"Fuck! Shit!"-shows Russell translating a young adult American's interior monologue into a version of Tourette's Syndrome. Everything Albert does can be described as a fit. He's so wrought up, he has no way of judging or gauging his behavior; he's just driven toward childlike but quasi-political ventures. Albert's some kind of green; he's against urban sprawl. The film records him running into other maniacs, including a pair of "existential detectives," Vivian and Bernard, played by Lily Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman, who are just slightly exaggerated to represent how far off we've gotten from traditional religion and ethics.
The joke of Albert consulting detectives who insist on looking into his soul (which he doesn't believe he has) uncovers the sick joke of soullessness. Vivian and Bernard have a nemesis in the French philosopher Caterine Vauban (Isabelle Huppert), who teaches a belief system based on nothingness. "Everything is conditional," she instructs. When Albert and his new best friend, a paranoid fireman Tommy Corn (Mark Wahlberg), subject themselves to Caterine's sway, Bernard shouts his disapproval: "That's Nihilism!" The edge Hoffman gives to the first syllable of the N word might be the most emotional line-reading of his career. Although Russell sympathizes with all his squirrelly characters, the fact that he backs up Bernard's emphasis is terrific.
I Heart Huckabees spotlights morality and politics. These concerns were obviated in such pop hits as Memento and Fight Club, which glorified the absence of religion and principles. It's clear that Russell has felt the loss, and the running gag in I Heart Huckabees is the philosophical con games prevailing in our world. This examination of cults and cultists may seem an esoteric theme, but despite the folderol surrounding it, Russell accurately critiques modern mania.
David O. Russell is among that group of contemporary filmmakers (along with Wes and P.T. Anderson, Spike Jonze, Alexander Payne, Sofia Coppola and others) currently tweaking the system. A friend calls this new breed the American Eccentrics, a good categorization since it distinguishes these upstarts from that last significant grouping of 70s filmmakers who were drawn to exploring American experience and pop tradition in order to understand their place in the world. The Eccentrics, formed by the fragmentation and solipsism of the 80s indie movement, are more interested in their personal idiosyncrasy. They don't connect to life outside their own world but view it as absurd and different. Films like The Royal Tenenbaums, Punch-Drunk Love, Adaptation, Lost in Translation and Russell's I Heart Huckabees reinforce a sense of boomers' egotism; as with Payne's About Schmidt, there is an insistence on braininess rather than connection with popular sentiment.
Popular feeling is distrusted; that's what the Eccentrics intuit about modern film culture. These post-hipsters are too smart to go for the empty, stylish attitudes of Todd Haynes or Guy Maddin. Rather than submit to the common emotion of Spider-Man 2 (with its attendant juvenilia), or Spielberg and Demme's humbling universality, these clever Dicks show their estrangement from the collective experience in preference for private feeling.
Beneath the idiosyncratic farce of I Heart Huckabees you'll find a simple plot about people in a small town responding to an intimidating institution. The Huckabees department store is a source of the media overload, the cultural static, the psychic and environmental distress that obsesses each main character. But Russell doesn't dare anything so banal as telling an anti-establishment story. (He knows that rebellion is as 60s as a march on the Republican National Convention.) What's extremely modern about I Heart Huckabees is the unappeasable sense of dissatisfaction that is driving everyone crazy. Thus, a title that is also an annoying logo. It doesn't state a hatred for capitalism, hegemony or any well-heeled, overbearing social clan, just a jokey, unspecified-and beloved-discontent.
Even Russell's cast of small-town eccentrics is proof of the changed pop-culture perspective. Schwartzman is the protestor (a misfit like Rushmore's Max Fischer), Jude Law the vain scion, Naomi Watts his pampered trophy wife, Wahlberg a fireman trying to preserve traditional values, plus that retinue of philosopher-psychiatrists whom Tomlin, Hoffman and Huppert portray as nutty, glittering icons. These mice running through the modern American maze in blind pursuit of their own wants are an unpredictable bunch, yet they are viewed fondly. Russell (with co-screenwriter Jeff Baena) understands their folly almost too well. His approach sometimes goes past satire; it's a form of antic antagonism that some people will no doubt mistake for the comic vision of Preston Sturges.
Let's stop the Sturges defamation right now. Every time there is a new American humorist on the movie scene, someone connects him to Sturges-and the Eccentrics are constantly showered with this inexact comparison. The Sturges likeness has become a delusion. It stops critics from appreciating the authentic character types and the ricocheting social contrasts that made Sturges special by overrating any kind of comic verbal flourishes. Sturges might indeed seem an eccentric form of Americana next to the WWII-era solemnity he mostly avoided, but today's Eccentrics lack his bracingly realistic social observation (which is also the hallmark of Sturges' true inheritors, Altman and the Coens). Throughout I Heart Huckabees Russell nearly approximates the energy of Sturges' Ale and Quail Club, especially in the scene where a community meeting turns into chaos. But this is a different energy and a different social sense. Russell's pandemonium is less an aspect of the American polity than it is a sign of irreconcilable objectives.
It is important to distinguish Russell from the old and new traditions that he actually opposes. As one of the best of the American Eccentrics, Russell gets to the essence of his characters' division. When I Heart Huckabees really works (which, undeniably, is half the time), it exposes the tension among American loners, each of them chasing and fulminating at cross-purposes. Sturges helped to define the American community; Russell's movie re-defines us in our moment of disrepair. This is a brilliant, distinctive ambition-more self-conscious than anything by the other Eccentrics, whose movies can't avoid a sense of haughty disdain. While I Heart Huckabees disparages solipsistic idiosyncracy, those traits are on hyper display.
But consider: How else could a filmmaker confront the pernicious influence of Ayn Rand (the prototype for Caterine Vauban) and retain his sense of humor? Of all the American Eccentrics, Russell seems to be the only one to realize the shift in moral positions that has occurred with Rand's popularity among recent collegiates. Desperate Albert and Tommy with his average-man puzzlement are, if you look deeply, recognizable pawns in a modern moral farce. They're foundering just like people torn between The Passion and Eternal Sunshine.
Eccentric Russell touches this very contemporary dilemma through Huckabees' most admirable quality-its philosophical rigor-but he can only do it by risking the fanciness he means to critique. At key moments, Russell employs special f/x recalling the moments in Three Kings that went inside the human body to reveal war's immediate damage. Here, the image breaks down into pixels showing that people share infinite, molecular connections-and disconnections. o
A DIRTY SHAME
DIRECTED BY JOHN WATERS
JOHN WATERS is an old-school eccentric-so old school that his calculated outrages now seem quaint. A Dirty Shame is like the last Madonna album, an exhibition of who-cares? provocations. Tracey Ullman and Chris Isaak play owners of a mom-and-pop in a Baltimore overrun by sex addicts. Johnny Knoxville-rangy, lewd and likable-is the culprit. He's Ray Ray, a sexual healer (who, in the film's best all-American metaphor, runs an auto-repair shop). Ray Ray turns everyone, even Mom and Pop, into sex addicts. "You'll never be the same!" he warns, imitating a sensual evangelist awaiting the day of "Ressursextion." Waters, reliably, provides it in the final image of Knoxville ejaculating from his head and pasting the screen with spooge.
Encouraging idiosyncrasy is different from planned scandal. Waters' audience is now the mainstream tv audience; they're two steps ahead of him with every dirty joke. Some gags, like always-willing Selma Blair as a porn star with mountainous tits, are bawdy-fun on first sight, then just stupid. Waters imagines an American community of liberated rutters, which makes him the most democratic of eccentrics, but admirers of Pecker will regret his refusal to be serious. Periodically superimposing spelled-out expletives over the images, Waters goes back to adolescence. Dirty words lose their thrill now that the words are banal.
THE LOVE ETERNE
DIRECTED BY LI HAN-HSIANG
THE LOVE ETERNE is one of the rarely imported Shaw Brothers productions. "Too Chinese" would be the marketing alibi, but the loss is ours. This musical myth about a Chinese girl's intention to study (by dressing as a boy) then falling in love with a student, only to have her parents set up a different, unwanted match is surpassingly elegant and high-strung. The strange Chinese tonal scale, though at first disorienting, seems to refresh a listener's responses. The Love Eterne is musically exquisite, and unusual enough so that the stage settings represent a dream state. The desirous solos and love duets match anything in Hollywood musical history.
Where The Love Eterne stands alone is the cultural premise of having the lead female and male roles both played by women, Betty Loh-Ti and Ivy Ling. It seems intrinsically radical, an immediate argument against chauvinist tradition. But these singer-actresses are astonishing for the way they embody emotion with grace and power.
Director Li Han-Hsiang captures them as they move and sing with overwhelming elegance so that you believe their fantasy-and their passion unto death-absolutely.