Film Is a Battleground #9: That’s Nihilism (I (Heart) Huckabees, Saved!)
I (HEART) HUCKABEES (in theaters)
SAVED! (on DVD)
I (HEART) HUCKABEES (David O. Russell, 2004)
*** (A must-see)
Incident heavy and plot light, I (HEART) HUCKABEES works a rare vein of American cinema, the political screwball comedy. Working in the tradition of Melvin Van Peebles’ WATERMELON MAN and De Palma’s great, unsettling HI, MOM!, the incessant mania displayed by HUCKABEES’ characters grows out of an angry, despairing burst of creative energy on the part of their creators (Russell, co-writer Jeff Baena, and the actors) that lashes out at absurdity and finds hope in the act of expressing outrage. That these films are intermittently funny but consistently outraged, suggests that humor occurs as a byproduct of creation rather than by design.
With regard to more contemporary films, HUCKABEES has frequently and inaccurately been compared to ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND. HUCKABEES is imperfect, nowhere near the achievement of ETERNAL SUNSHINE. Russell struggles to integrate ideas and action (though, to be fair, that very difficulty is one of the film’s key concerns) with the felicity Kaufman, Gondry, and their actors managed. HUCKABEES is closer in spirit and accomplishment to the most recent films of Spielberg and Demme. Like both THE TERMINAL and THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, HUCKABEES takes place in a distinctly confused and emotionally battered contemporary America. All three films achieve grace for their characters by insisting that the possibilities inherent in America offer escape from the inhuman immorality that can develop out of the very same freedom. HUCKABEES shares with Spielberg’s film an insistence on the value of connectedness. Characteristically, Spielberg’s vision of connectedness is a multi-ethnic, giving, and tangible community whereas Russell’s is philosophical. And, like Demme, Russell relentlessly demonstrates that one’s morality is revealed through action rather than insistence.
Russell does not shy away from suggesting that life is complicated and contradictory and that the urge for self-improvement can derive from self-involvement. Russell examines philosophy as a series of dualities which neither negate nor mimic each other. Albert Markovski (Jason Schwartzman) and Tommy Corn (Mark Wahlberg) are designated as each other’s “other” on the journey to enlightenment by the existential detectives, Bernard and Vivian Jaffe (Lily Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman), they have hired to make sense out of the confusion of their lives. Markovski and Corn become alienated by the Jaffes’ insistence on the inter-connectedness of everything and begin to experiment with the philosophy of former Jaffe protégé and current rival Caterine Vauban (Isabelle Huppert) who espouses her philosophy pithily on her business card: “Cruelty. Manipulation. Meaninglessness.”
The revelation of Vauban’s mantra provides Hoffman with the film’s most moving moment, the pinnacle of an uncharacteristically warm and witty performance. The reading he brings to the line, “That’s nihilism,” simultaneously communicates both his disappointment with the evident ethos and acceptance of the complex, contradictory nature of life. To accept that we are all connected is to give up some control. To reject this idea, to accept and believe in meaninglessness is to assert the primacy of the self (which is quite different from John Woo’s moving insistence on the primacy of the soul in FACE/OFF), disengage from the world, and absolve yourself of responsibility for its state. Russell’s greatest achievement in the film is to reject nihilism without dismissing its appeal.
Nor does Russell deny that self-involvement might engender self-improvement. Markovski has a nemesis, a knowingly weak contemporary dupe of a Nabokovian doppelganger, the handsome, shallow, and adept Brad Stand (Jude Law). Stand employs the Jaffes for the mere amusement of knowing that doing so will annoy Markovski. Yet even Stand’s superficial investment in the curious process allows the Jaffes, with one well-timed question (the brilliance of which I shan’t ruin by revealing it out of context here), to shatter the illusion of himself he had created and force genuine self-examination.
If the entire film rose to the level of Jude Law’s epiphany-induced breakdown or Mark Wahlberg’s brilliant performance, it would rival the accomplishment of THREE KINGS. It does not, most notably in Jason Schwartzman’s performance. The character of Markovski, a frustrated artist and ineffectual activist, exists primarily as a young man who can only conceive of the idea of himself. Granted, this is the sort of person who would employ existential detectives, but the character exists more as a type (whose education outstrips his emotional development) than the film’s other characters, whose distinct manias overwhelm Schwartzman’s general malaise. The film revolves around a hollow center allowing it to break free for moments both delightful and disappointingly tangential.
Upon first viewing, I find the film challenging, invigorating, and funny when it’s not being obtuse and unamusing. The former descriptions are more frequently accurate than the latter.
This is what I think now but I have little doubt my feelings about this film will change with subsequent viewings. It brims with the life of ideas to the degree that all cannot be absorbed and understood in the moment of experience. What appear to be limitations may be unrecognized moments of insight and interconnectedness. As I come to know the film better, its flaws may recede and its great virtues become inescapable. Recent precedents for this process include HURLYBURLY, THE BIG LEBOWSKI, and THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS.
Then again, I saw RAISING CAIN for the first time in a long while the other day and, though still amusing, it seemed far sillier and less majestic than I remembered. Such are the vagaries of memory and consciousness. The experience of watching a film depends on both the film and the viewer. The film (unless it’s BLADE RUNNER) remains the same. The viewer changes over time in an attempt achieve connections and repair disconnections with life. This informs our relationship with art. The pantheon of today is not the pantheon of yesterday and will not be the pantheon of tomorrow. Emphases shift, the passions of youth come to seem tired with age and the previously disregarded becomes central to one’s understanding. Life is infinite. It can be cruel. It can be manipulative. It is full of meaning.
SAVED! (Brian Dannelly, 2004)
0 stars (No redeeming facet)
An empty, phony film, SAVED!, unlike HUCKABEES, only pretends to engage with the reasons why people believe what they believe. This alleged religious and cultural satire seems most informed by Alexander Payne’s films yet fails to achieve even their modest level of accomplishment. Payne’s films are frustratingly mediocre because they display a certain amount of intelligence, wit, and talent trapped inside their dry schematics. I think, but hesitate to say, that this reticence may be inherently Midwestern.
Where Payne’s films make you wish they were better, SAVED! makes you wish those involved wouldn’t have bothered. The filmmakers fail to demonstrate why their characters choose to believe in God. The only options in the film’s moral universe are uncritical belief or self-righteous secularism. Neither option appears appealing to one’s self or generous to the world.
Mary Louise Parker, as a born-again single mother, and Martin Donovan, as the community’s pastor, attempt to inject their tentative courtship with meaning. The two gifted actors strain to show how the excitement and fear of attraction between pastor and congregant might instigate a crisis of faith, but the sub-soap opera characterizations, which don’t allow for self-examination much less crisis (hysteria and catatonia are the two states of being made available to the cast) strangle their efforts. The younger cast members (Jena Malone, Patrick Fugit, Mandy Moore, Heather Matarazzo, Macaulay Culkin, and Eva Amurri), some of whom have done good work in the past, have little to do here thus I hesitate to criticize them for much more than poor judgment.
Click here to read the full post with comments
SAVED! (on DVD)
I (HEART) HUCKABEES (David O. Russell, 2004)
*** (A must-see)
Incident heavy and plot light, I (HEART) HUCKABEES works a rare vein of American cinema, the political screwball comedy. Working in the tradition of Melvin Van Peebles’ WATERMELON MAN and De Palma’s great, unsettling HI, MOM!, the incessant mania displayed by HUCKABEES’ characters grows out of an angry, despairing burst of creative energy on the part of their creators (Russell, co-writer Jeff Baena, and the actors) that lashes out at absurdity and finds hope in the act of expressing outrage. That these films are intermittently funny but consistently outraged, suggests that humor occurs as a byproduct of creation rather than by design.
With regard to more contemporary films, HUCKABEES has frequently and inaccurately been compared to ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND. HUCKABEES is imperfect, nowhere near the achievement of ETERNAL SUNSHINE. Russell struggles to integrate ideas and action (though, to be fair, that very difficulty is one of the film’s key concerns) with the felicity Kaufman, Gondry, and their actors managed. HUCKABEES is closer in spirit and accomplishment to the most recent films of Spielberg and Demme. Like both THE TERMINAL and THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, HUCKABEES takes place in a distinctly confused and emotionally battered contemporary America. All three films achieve grace for their characters by insisting that the possibilities inherent in America offer escape from the inhuman immorality that can develop out of the very same freedom. HUCKABEES shares with Spielberg’s film an insistence on the value of connectedness. Characteristically, Spielberg’s vision of connectedness is a multi-ethnic, giving, and tangible community whereas Russell’s is philosophical. And, like Demme, Russell relentlessly demonstrates that one’s morality is revealed through action rather than insistence.
Russell does not shy away from suggesting that life is complicated and contradictory and that the urge for self-improvement can derive from self-involvement. Russell examines philosophy as a series of dualities which neither negate nor mimic each other. Albert Markovski (Jason Schwartzman) and Tommy Corn (Mark Wahlberg) are designated as each other’s “other” on the journey to enlightenment by the existential detectives, Bernard and Vivian Jaffe (Lily Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman), they have hired to make sense out of the confusion of their lives. Markovski and Corn become alienated by the Jaffes’ insistence on the inter-connectedness of everything and begin to experiment with the philosophy of former Jaffe protégé and current rival Caterine Vauban (Isabelle Huppert) who espouses her philosophy pithily on her business card: “Cruelty. Manipulation. Meaninglessness.”
The revelation of Vauban’s mantra provides Hoffman with the film’s most moving moment, the pinnacle of an uncharacteristically warm and witty performance. The reading he brings to the line, “That’s nihilism,” simultaneously communicates both his disappointment with the evident ethos and acceptance of the complex, contradictory nature of life. To accept that we are all connected is to give up some control. To reject this idea, to accept and believe in meaninglessness is to assert the primacy of the self (which is quite different from John Woo’s moving insistence on the primacy of the soul in FACE/OFF), disengage from the world, and absolve yourself of responsibility for its state. Russell’s greatest achievement in the film is to reject nihilism without dismissing its appeal.
Nor does Russell deny that self-involvement might engender self-improvement. Markovski has a nemesis, a knowingly weak contemporary dupe of a Nabokovian doppelganger, the handsome, shallow, and adept Brad Stand (Jude Law). Stand employs the Jaffes for the mere amusement of knowing that doing so will annoy Markovski. Yet even Stand’s superficial investment in the curious process allows the Jaffes, with one well-timed question (the brilliance of which I shan’t ruin by revealing it out of context here), to shatter the illusion of himself he had created and force genuine self-examination.
If the entire film rose to the level of Jude Law’s epiphany-induced breakdown or Mark Wahlberg’s brilliant performance, it would rival the accomplishment of THREE KINGS. It does not, most notably in Jason Schwartzman’s performance. The character of Markovski, a frustrated artist and ineffectual activist, exists primarily as a young man who can only conceive of the idea of himself. Granted, this is the sort of person who would employ existential detectives, but the character exists more as a type (whose education outstrips his emotional development) than the film’s other characters, whose distinct manias overwhelm Schwartzman’s general malaise. The film revolves around a hollow center allowing it to break free for moments both delightful and disappointingly tangential.
Upon first viewing, I find the film challenging, invigorating, and funny when it’s not being obtuse and unamusing. The former descriptions are more frequently accurate than the latter.
This is what I think now but I have little doubt my feelings about this film will change with subsequent viewings. It brims with the life of ideas to the degree that all cannot be absorbed and understood in the moment of experience. What appear to be limitations may be unrecognized moments of insight and interconnectedness. As I come to know the film better, its flaws may recede and its great virtues become inescapable. Recent precedents for this process include HURLYBURLY, THE BIG LEBOWSKI, and THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS.
Then again, I saw RAISING CAIN for the first time in a long while the other day and, though still amusing, it seemed far sillier and less majestic than I remembered. Such are the vagaries of memory and consciousness. The experience of watching a film depends on both the film and the viewer. The film (unless it’s BLADE RUNNER) remains the same. The viewer changes over time in an attempt achieve connections and repair disconnections with life. This informs our relationship with art. The pantheon of today is not the pantheon of yesterday and will not be the pantheon of tomorrow. Emphases shift, the passions of youth come to seem tired with age and the previously disregarded becomes central to one’s understanding. Life is infinite. It can be cruel. It can be manipulative. It is full of meaning.
SAVED! (Brian Dannelly, 2004)
0 stars (No redeeming facet)
An empty, phony film, SAVED!, unlike HUCKABEES, only pretends to engage with the reasons why people believe what they believe. This alleged religious and cultural satire seems most informed by Alexander Payne’s films yet fails to achieve even their modest level of accomplishment. Payne’s films are frustratingly mediocre because they display a certain amount of intelligence, wit, and talent trapped inside their dry schematics. I think, but hesitate to say, that this reticence may be inherently Midwestern.
Where Payne’s films make you wish they were better, SAVED! makes you wish those involved wouldn’t have bothered. The filmmakers fail to demonstrate why their characters choose to believe in God. The only options in the film’s moral universe are uncritical belief or self-righteous secularism. Neither option appears appealing to one’s self or generous to the world.
Mary Louise Parker, as a born-again single mother, and Martin Donovan, as the community’s pastor, attempt to inject their tentative courtship with meaning. The two gifted actors strain to show how the excitement and fear of attraction between pastor and congregant might instigate a crisis of faith, but the sub-soap opera characterizations, which don’t allow for self-examination much less crisis (hysteria and catatonia are the two states of being made available to the cast) strangle their efforts. The younger cast members (Jena Malone, Patrick Fugit, Mandy Moore, Heather Matarazzo, Macaulay Culkin, and Eva Amurri), some of whom have done good work in the past, have little to do here thus I hesitate to criticize them for much more than poor judgment.
Labels: brian dannelly, david o russell, i heart huckabees, saved
Click here to read the full post with comments
posted by Bret LaGree at 16:41
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