I Heart Huckabees engages in a lot of wordplay and sometimes manages to convince you that its philosophy is deeper than it actually is. It’s not. The ideas behind I Heart Huckabees are actually quite simple.

Albert (Jason Schwartzman) works for Open Spaces, an organization that picket’s malls for using up land in the city. He runs into a tall black man (Ger Duany) and three different times and thinks it means something important in his life. He finds a card that leads him to some existential detectives, and there his life is examined by Bernard (Dustin Hoffman) and Vivian (Lily Tomlin), who try to solve his problems by explaining that everything in the universe is one and that we’re all connected. Albert later finds Caterine Vauban (Isabella Huppert), who tells him the opposite, and Albert finds a way to reconcile the two ideas.

In the midst of the constant chaos, Albert meets Jude Law, Naomi Watts and Mark Walberg, each seeking existential help in some way. I don’t think this is something Sarte would have written, but it does manage to stay interesting intellectually.

Huckabees is funny, but not in the usual way. It manages both high end satire and low end slapstick all at the same time, creating a product that’s just unusual. Nonetheless, there are some great moments, many of which reminded me of Wes Anderson, but maybe that’s just Schwartzman.

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