Who Hearts David O. Russell?

David O. Russell’s new film I Heart Huckabees is a manic rumination on the fruitless search for the meaning of life. So how come he looks so relaxed?

The writer-director is sprawled over a chair in the eighth floor suite of a luxury Boston hotel. Casually dressed in a navy blazer and rumpled white shirt, hands clasped behind his head and feet propped up on a coffee table, he exudes an aura of sangfroid that is infectious.

Hailed as one of the finest filmmakers of the 1990s American indie boom, Russell has had no trouble establishing his reputation among the celluloid hipster set. His darkly comedic films have tickled critics and cineastes alike, from the low-budget Spanking the Monkey, a dark comedy about masturbation and incest, to Three Kings, a comedic, scathing take on the first Gulf War.

In Huckabees, Russell mixes an A-list cast (Jude Law, Naomi Watts, Dustin Hoffman) with a surrealist plot, philosophical conundrums and the eccentric and frenetic tale of an environmental activist who hires two “existentialist detectives” to sort out his life, loves and hates.

The main character, Albert—played by the intense young actor Jason Schwartzman, best known for his debut role as Max Fischer in Wes Anderson’s Rushmore—is a fledgling activist trying to use poetry to help protect a local marsh. In the background looms the specter of consumerism in the form of Huckabees, a department store chain planning on wiping away Albert’s beloved wetlands.

It’s a strange film, and in the interview today Russell seems a strange guy. At one point in the interview he idly picks up a porcelain plate from the hotel nightstand.

“Let’s throw an Armani ashtray out the window,” he says matter-of-factly. His publicists nervously laugh—will he actually do it?

The plate stays indoors, but the threat of mischief is never far with Russell in the room. Later on silence lingers as he considers the relationship between activism and filmmaking.

Russell stares out the window for a few moments. The response finally comes out in a deeply thoughtful tone.

“Activism is the foreplay,” he says slowly. “Moviemaking is the orgasm.”

Long, long pause. No one in the room looks at each other.

“Activism is pinching the nipples,” Russell happily continues, enjoying the moment. “Moviemaking is kissing the nipples.”

Russell speaks with the self-assured tone of a man who takes himself much too seriously. But then he smiles, and it dawns on you—he’s just fucking around.

The same might be said of Huckabees. Beneath a veneer of pseudo-intellectualism, the movie is, at heart, a joke. The plot seems to unfold in a parallel universe, a world where every citizen is required to take a college survey course in philosophy and then spend the rest of their lives discussing it. Mark Wahlberg, as a nihilist firefighter, is introduced having a fight with his girlfriend; instead of bickering over who did or didn’t do the dishes, he is trying to convince her that life is meaningless.

With this absurdism, Russell has tapped into the same vein of postwar art that inspired the tragicomic brilliance of the original masters of existentialism. Huckabees is an unreality, a musical with songs by Sartre and book by Beckett.

“It’s a cocktail of zen, Sartre, and nihilism,” Russell says. He talks of the film’s political message against corporate behemoths like Warner Brothers, the studio that is refusing to distribute Russell’s new documentary about the current War in Iraq. But he demurs from answering queries about the film’s relationship with 9/11, an incident that is specifically referred to by Wahlberg’s character.

His silence on the subject seems odd, as Huckabees is a film borne of its times. Its mix of surrealism and inanity (Russell cites Magritte and Buñuel as major influences) reflects what some audiences see in their surroundings today: a world facing fear and the unknown, shaken by seemingly random events and unsure how to proceed.

But to Russell and his cast, these bigger issues seem tangential to the comedy.

“The brilliant thing that David did was send a message through a laugh,” Schwartzman says of the film. The boyish actor sits across the room from Russell, clad in a Brooks Brothers button-down, dress pants and sneakers. “The ideas in the movie are huge messages, huge ideas that we do need to ask ourselves. They are absurd at times. I think the great thing David did was make the ideas easy to understand.”

Schwartzman’s character Albert is a post-puberty Max Fischer, with longer hair, a scraggly beard and none of the charm. Schwartzman opens the film by shouting a stream of obscenities; in person, he makes somewhat less of an impression. He balances his slight, thin build on a couch, sipping a glass of water and at one point sucking on a lemon. Schwartzman’s conversation—when he gets a word in edgewise amidst Russell’s freewheeling monologues—swings wildly from dull stories from the Huckabees set to an extended riff on the legacy of that ’80’s classic, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. His comments are intended to promote Huckabees, but their chaotic nature only serve to underscore the film’s flaws.

On how it transports the audience: “David created a situation where the comedy is like a train, and all the big ideas are like stowaways on that train.”

On the atmosphere on set: “It felt to me like every second was like throwing up a Hail Mary, but with the greatest football team in the world. It’s like, it’s like, it always felt like ten seconds left, you got the ball and you’re down by one, and the whole team felt like Michael Jordan.”

Like Russell’s film, Schwartzman seems unable to fully articulate his ideas, and the result is a cluttered mess of mixed metaphors and hollow insights.

When Schwartzman pauses for breath, the interview turns back to the director.

“Is there enough activist filmmaking today?” I ask Russell, who once worked as for a Massachusetts consumer advocacy group.

“Now I’m in the category of an activist,” he laughs. Schwartzman laughs. The publicists laugh. Suddenly, we’re on the next question. When Russell isn’t interested in a query, he just doesn’t answer it.

“One minute left,” the publicist warns, a hint of urgency in her voice.

Across the hotel room, Russell turns towards me, a mischievous look on his face. “Okay, lightning round.”

“Do you think audiences will go for it?” I ask.

He stares back at me.

“Audiences?” he asks incredulously. “You mean you? We can only talk about we who are in this room. You guys are like pollsters, you always talk about a third entity. I made it ’cause I like it. It makes me laugh.”

He notices my skeptical smile, and laughs again. “He thinks I’m trying to bullshit him,” he says. “All I can do is make a movie that I think is funny.”

And there it is. After nearly a half-hour of spouting pop philosophy, quoting Outkast lyrics (“shake it like a Polaroid picture,” he hums at one point) and waxing faux-political, Russell has finally come clean. The secret behind the tangled existential web of Huckabees is that there is no secret—it makes the director laugh, and that’s good enough for him.

—Staff writer Michael M. Grynbaum can be reached at grynbaum@fas.harvard. edu.