Russell: I Heart Huckabees (2004)

At one level, the supremely postmodern irony that came of age in the 90s was all about recognising that real life is mediated through conventions, codes and cliches. But it was also about recognising that real life was mediated full stop, a defence mechanism against a world in which different media were starting to converge at an unprecedented rate. Twenty years along the track, dwelling on that mediation no longer seems novel, nor particular accurate, since one of the byproducts of ubiquitous social media is that sites of mediation no longer feel discrete, local or concrete any more – the mediasphere has imperceptibly bled into the substance of everyday life rather than continuing to mediate it in a traditional sense. Along with that change has come a waning of irony, a transition to a post-ironic mindset that’s as different from the 90s as the 90s were from, say, the 60s. Of course, that transition has been gradual, inconsistent and imperceptible, but it’s peculiarly and poetically crystallised in I Heart Huckabees, David O. Russell’s most experimental film since his debut, Spanking the Monkey, and the high watermark of a certain moment in the mid-00s when the ensemble drama was revived and remediated to meet the needs of a new era of digital connectivity. Strangely – or perhaps ironically – it’s a high watermark precisely because it doesn’t work, laying bare the limitations of the ironic mode even as it desperately attempts to create the ironic think piece par excellence, a failure that’s perhaps a bit surprising given the premise, which sounds quite robust or at least intriguing on paper, with Jason Schwartzman and Mark Wahlberg playing a pair of environmental activists whose lives are turned upside down by a trio of existential detectives, played by Lily Tomlin, Dustin Hoffman and Isabelle Huppert, as they work to protect a local green space from the Huckabees corporation, represented by Jude Law and Naomi Watts. Despite all those machinations, however, there’s virtually no story, character or dialogue – just an extended, splintered monologue by Russell on the nature of time, space and the universe that seems to have recognised its own limitations from the very start, with virtually every encounter of any note gravitating towards a major freakout or temper tantrum, which perhaps explains the notoriously volatile atmosphere during shooting as well. For a film that has about the smuggest, most ironic aspirations you could imagine, it continually fails to ironically extricate itself from the world it’s depicting, creating a quite compelling reflexive impotence that’s a bit like watching high irony collapse in on itself in the name of an emergent new sincerity that Russell nevertheless can’t quite commit to either. In that sense, the real genius of the film is the kind of world – or non-world – that Russell evokes, a world so anonymous and inoffensive – bland but shorn of any humanising bleakness – that it effectively disables irony as an option, drawing you into every scene with the perky, indifferent seductiveness of Big Box America, as we're set adrift in an urban landscape denuded of even the slightest regional or local flavour. As a result, virtually every shot feels as if it opens out onto a strip mall carpark, while virtually every scene is overlaid with Bacharachesque elevator music, soothing you without ever making you feel attached to the characters or situation, and brightening each space with the cool functionality of a well-designed business park. In this world, it really makes very little difference whether the Huckabees corporation uses the green space to build a strip mall or conserves the green space as a PR gesture – possibly the closest the film comes to a narrative bind - since pretty much every space feels cushioned and buffered by PR protocol, made over by post-humans working in HR. Perhaps that’s why, as one character puts it, “everything is the same, even if it’s different” - difference usually being a matter of the twee, cutesy, picaresque mode so in vogue at this moment - as the tone becomes more and more artificial and less and less human, until it’s more like a new breed of animation than a live film, animated by concerns that are starting to surpass the capacities of live cinema to handle them.