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‘Huckabees≠ is everything and nothing at once

"I Heart Huckabees" is perhaps the most thoughtful bit of thoughtlessness ever to hit the screen.

Let me explain this a little. Smart movies are good. Heaven knows we see them so rarely. So when a flick comes along with such an intellectual prowess as "I Heart Huckabees," it's worth a second look. Not too many films ask the big questions anymore.

And when it comes to big questions, "Huckabees" is loaded to the brim, but it fails to come up with any big answers. This is not a crime in itself. Leave it open to interpretation. However, when the movie itself is vacant of anything other than questions, and lots of them, we run into a bit of a problem.

Don't get me wrong; "Huckabees" is stylistically wild stuff in the vein of "Magnolia" or this year's "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," and visually, it≠'s a knockout. But when it comes to delivering an effective narrative, "Huckabees" falls flat by simply treating its characters as nothing more than mouthpieces.

None of these people, as real as they may seem at times, have any emotional foundation in reality. They merely spout garbled wisdom culled from a Philosophy 101 textbook, and although they sometimes have smart things to say, it doesn't matter. They are, in general, boring and superficial people. It's hard for what they're saying to have any impact at all.

Not to say the film isn't still a fun ride. To divulge too much of the plot would be crime, and to even find the words to do so would be quite an arduous task. Therefore, we'll lay it down like this: Albert (Jason Schwartzman) is an environmental poet with an existential crisis. Like any reasonable person would do, he seeks help, here in the form of the Jaffes (Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin), who make their living as sort of existential detectives.

As it turns out, Albert is frustrated with his nemesis, Brad Stand (Jude Law), an ad exec at Huckabees ("The Everything Store") who supports Albert's tree-hugging cause but goes about it in his own charming and sterile way.

Eventually, Brad and his girlfriend Dawn (Naomi Watts), the cute spokeswoman for the company, enter treatment as well, causing Albert to have "Fight Club"-like thoughts of his corporate prison and her to go grungy in an Amish bonnet. Frustrated, Albert befriends an oil-hating firefighter (Mark Wahlberg), and a radical French thinker (Isabelle Huppert) who tells him the Jaffes may be the very cause of his problem.

If you thought that summary was difficult to get through, you should try seeing the movie.

As bold and provocative as it can be, "Huckabees" too often trips over itself and takes the audience with it. On the upside, the visual landscape is amazing, the score by Jon Brion is a treat, and the actors are obviously having a ball. Hoffman and Tomlin are great fun to watch, and Schwarzman seems perfectly cast as the confused and cynical Albert. The real shining star is Wahlberg, whose firefighter is so adamant about the oil crisis that he rides his bike to fires. He plays the perfect nut, and he gets all the biggest laughs.

Unfortunately, all of this can't carry the film. "Huckabees" boils down to one central debate: Is the universe cosmically connected and we are all just pieces of the giant puzzle, or is it all hopelessly dreary and bleak, just something to waste our time on until we finally die? In many ways, that's the film itself. It would like to be everything and nothing all at one. Tragically, the nothing is what you end up leaving with.

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