(rated R)
Albert (Jason Schwartzman), is a hysterical tree-hugging guy screaming out insanities like he’s got a bad case of Tourette’s syndrome. Albert is the head of a group that preserves green-open-spaces in America’s land of the mall. Brad (Jude Law) is Albert’s nemesis, a handsome well-spoken rising young exec that manages not only the corporation (Huckabees) but sleeps with the Huckabees poster girl (Naomi Watts). Brad even wins over the two ‘existential detectives’ (Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin) that Albert has hired to spy on himself to find out what is exactly wrong. Make sense? Didn’t think so. And even though the movie delivers more and more story in exhausting craziness, it really never does. Waiting for the movie to kick in, one begins to question if perhaps we needed to be high to watch it, let alone understand it, since the reiterating premise is the ‘perception of reality’ and that we need to have our world’s dismantled because we are all connected. (Insert love beads, finger snaps and tambourines.) Leaving me feeling confused, let alone dismantled myself, this movie feels like it’s trying to be hip, cool, brilliant – a la “Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind” or “Being John Malkovich” but manages to miss its mark. The only thing hitting its mark, is Mark Wahlberg as a do-gooder fireman with violent-streak-sincerity, who tackles a role that gives us hope every time he’s on the screen. But alas, he can’t carry a movie alone, even with the weight of Watts, Hoffman, Tomlin and Law. If you think the title throws us off, (with heart? or is it love?), wait until you see the movie.
