BEFORE: I know this film may not be a romance film in the traditional sense of the word, or maybe in any sense of the word, but I'm hoping there's some relationship stuff in it. Even if not, it's got the word "Heart" in the title (or at least the symbol for a heart) and we are getting close to Valentine's Day...
OK, I realize that's a bit of a stretch. The truth is that when I was putting my February list together, things weren't really connecting completely, especially since I had a mix of newer films and classic ones to get to. But tomorrow's film is one of those that could serve as a bridge between old and new, and then I just had to figure out how to link to THAT one. And both that film and this one were currently running on cable, AND they share an actress, and so it seemed like it was meant to be, even if this one isn't a romantic comedy or a dark treatise on break-ups. Seeing as it enables me to connect to the other films, with Jason Schwartzman carrying over from "The Overnight", sometimes I have to bend my own rules a little bit, just to make things work out.
Plus I think I tried to watch this movie once before, and failed - maybe I lost interest in it? That counts a a "movie sin", and I have to deal with those, even if after 9 years of focusing on movies, I don't think I have too many sins left to purge.
Tomorrow, February 12, on TCM's "31 Days of Oscar", it's more Best Director nominees and winners:
6:00 am "The Informer" (1935) dir: John Ford
7:45 am "You Can't Take It With You" (1938) dir: Frank Capra
10:00 am "The Front Page" (1931) dir: Lewis Milestone
12:00 pm "Dodsworth" (1936) dir: William Wyler
2:00 pm "David and Lisa" (1962) dir: Frank Perry
4:00 pm "The Southerner" (1945) dir: Jean Renoir
5:45 pm "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" (1966) dir: Mike Nichols
8:00 pm "Cabaret" (1972) dir: Bob Fosse
10:15 pm "Giant" (1956) dir: George Stevens
1:45 am "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" (1948) dir: John Huston
4:00 am "The Divine Lady" (1929) dir: Frank Lloyd
Another 5 of these have already been seen: "You Can't Take It With You", "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf", "Cabaret", "Giant" and "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" and another 5 out of 11 brings my total up to 49 out of 130. 37.6%
THE PLOT: A husband-and-wife team play detective, but not in the traditional sense. Instead, they help others solve their existential issues, the kind that keep you up all night, wondering what it all means.
AFTER: If ever there was a movie with a bad reputation, this would be it. It's famous for a couple of videos that were released to YouTube featuring director David O. Russell and Lily Tomlin arguing, during which a lot of hurtful name-calling took place. People were reminded that a movie set is clearly a high-pressure situation, and that you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, so to speak.
But there is a germ of an idea to be found in this story, the problem is that it's covered up with so much random nonsense that it's almost impossible to locate it. It reminds me mostly of "The Royal Tenenbaums", where there were similarly a ton of characters who were all white and privileged and they all had so much time on their hands that they couldn't help but spend it all navel-gazing and wondering what it all MEANS at the end of the day, which is just about the most counter-productive way to be. (Finally Gene Hackman's character figures it out, oh, you're supposed to get up and go to work and care about your family and LIVE instead of just sitting around moping and thinking.). So if "Nocturnal Animals" was an attempt to make a David Lynch-style film, maybe this one was an attempt to make a Wes Anderson-type film - only in both cases, you can't top the masters. Nobody can be as enigmatic as Lynch, and nobody can be as "twee" as Wes Anderson.
This film's director went on to make the films "The Fighter", "Joy" and "Silver Linings Playbook" - and those seem more grounded in reality, because being a boxer or an inventor selling products on QVC are real things that some real people do. "I Heart Huckabees" is a film about existential detectives and the people who hire them, and that's not even a real thing. So the film is not grounded in reality, it's got no foundation, nothing for the audience to latch on to, and that's a fatal mistake.
So I guess you have to take everything in this film as a metaphor, since the situations as presented are just impossible. Over the course of the film four characters hire these existential detectives to spy on them, I guess to figure out what's going wrong in their lives, or what it all means at the end of the day, because I guess they're just too close to their own lives to figure that out for themselves? Most people are scared off by "existentialism", but really it's just theories about the meaning of life, assuming that there is one. My takeaway is that these detectives represent the theory that there IS order to the universe, not necessarily in a religious way, but a belief that there is a point to what happens, that maybe we're each here for a purpose, and during those times when life seems against us or things aren't going our way, it just means that we've temporarily forgotten that fact.
These detectives have a counterpart in the film, a French woman who steals their clients, in order to convince them that there is NO order to the universe, no meaning of life, there's only chaos and deceit and people killing time by hurting each other until we're all consumed by the grave and then there's just a big void. Which is nihilism, and it's another way to go. Although it's an opposing philosophy, it's possible that many people use this in a similar fashion to get through the day - because if you're on the fence about this, you'll probably just sit around and wonder what it all means, or if there's any meaning at all, because between order and chaos lies randomness and madness.
Specifically, a man leading a coalition to fight urban sprawl and save the wetlands keeps seeing a tall African man everywhere he goes, and he wonders what this coincidence means. (I think the answer to this one is simple - it's a very white city, so a tall black man just tends to stand out. It's the old "that yellow van is always on the corner" problem, you notice the van enough times that you tend to thin it's always there.). His rival is a sales executive for Huckabee's, which is a big chain of stores that wants to build just about everywhere. The executive's girlfriend is a swimsuit/underwear model for the store, but she wonders if he loves her just because of her beauty, so she starts wearing frumpy dresses to test his love. And then there's a firefighter who believes that petroleum is evil and poisoning the world, so after his wife leaves him, he starts riding a bike everywhere, including to go fight fires.
These four people are the clients of the existential detectives, who believe that sooner or later, everyone will come to see how everything is connected, that you have to step back and look at the big picture in order to understand the universe. But two of them come under the influence of the rival philosophy, and they learn that by distracting themselves in the proper ways (having sex works, or getting hit in the face repeatedly by a big red ball) they can stop thinking so much and start just being in the moment. I guess the detectives are proven correct, because the plot does bring all the threads together in the end, and everything IS connected, but really, that's because that's what movies do, not because life works that way.
Philosophically, I prefer something of a middle ground, like believing that life has no meaning other than that we choose to impart upon it. I agree that the universe is a chaotic place, but I spend both my workdays AND my free time trying to organize it according to my rules, and that's what both makes me happy and gets me through to the next day. Destiny is nothing more than sticking to a somewhat flexible plan, and since I haven't seen any proof of God, I have to conclude that either he doesn't exist, or he created the universe and then walked away from it, which was probably the smart move to make.
I'm going to let this stay here in the February chain because there is a little bit of relationship-y stuff here, like the married detectives who work together, and then among the other characters, there's one relationship that ends and another one that starts. So it's a "push" in the contest between love winning and love losing, really. It's still not a great movie, not by any stretch of the imagination, but my reasons for declaring it to be terrible might be vastly different from yours.
Also starring Dustin Hoffman (last seen in "Chef"), Lily Tomlin (last seen in "Orange County"), Jude Law (last seen in "Enemy at the Gates"), Mark Wahlberg (last seen in "Patriots Day"), Isabelle Huppert (last seen in "The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them"), Naomi Watts (last seen in "Demolition"), Isla Fisher (last seen in "Nocturnal Animals"), Ger Duany, Jonah Hill (last seen in "War Dogs"), Richard Jenkins (last heard in "Spotlight"), Kevin Dunn (last seen in "Keeping Up with the Joneses"), Jean Smart (last seen in "The Accountant"), Talia Shire, Bob Gunton (last seen in "Runner Runner"), Tippi Hedren (last seen in "Pacific Heights"), Darlene Hunt, Jake Muxworthy, Richard Appel, Benjamin Nurick, Sydney Zarp, Kamala Lopez, with cameos from John Rothman (last seen in "Heartburn"), Shania Twain.
RATING: 3 out of 10 non-hidden microphones
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