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Meanwhile, Brad hires the Jaffes for his own wicked purposes. But instead of getting the upper hand in the battle with Albert, he and his girlfriend Dawn (Naomi Watts)—Huckabees' Barbie-like spokesmodel—plunge into identity crises of their own. Brad proves unable to endure the psychological surgery that exposes the ugliness beneath his picture-perfect public image. And Dawn learns that, just as she can perform sexy contortions on Huckabees commercials, she's quite bendy when it comes to her worldview as well.

Albert (Jason Schwartzman) and Tommy (Mark Wahlberg) confer

It's hard to imagine that a storyteller could maintain such a surreal, overcrowded, and philosophical narrative without losing the audience. But Russell directs with the ambition of Robert Altman (Short Cuts) and the nervous energy of Paul Thomas Anderson (Punch-Drunk Love), and his script sounds like it was co-written by Howard Hawks (His Girl Friday) and Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich) and adapted from a book by Jean-Paul Sartre. It's a highly entertaining accomplishment, even if it never arrives at a satisfactory resolution.

While it's not Russell's best film—that would be Three Kings—it's certainly a memorably zany foray into uncharted cinematic territory. It's more mind-bending than Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and more aggressively soul-searching than Dogville. It benefits from another inventive soundtrack by Jon Brion and can boast of the biggest all-star cast this year.

The actors clearly relish the opportunity to play such manic loonies. Jude Law gives his most interesting performance since Gattaca, creating a convincingly wicked and worldly egomaniac who delights in climbing the corporate ladder; when he falls, he's persuasively distraught. Naomi Watts is pitch-perfect as a ditzy blonde who discovers there's more to life than glamour. Isabelle Huppert, audacious as ever, plays a comical variation on the sick and twisted characters she's played in subversive films like La Ceremonie and The Piano Teacher—here, she even gets a chance to fearlessly wallow in the mud like a pig. Hoffman and Tomlin are a surprisingly wacky match, and Jason Schwartzman mirrors our own bewilderment at all that transpires.

The biggest surprise is Mark Wahlberg's performance; he makes Tommy stand out as the most human and affecting of the bunch. Thus it's even more distressing when the film portrays Tommy as discovering fulfillment and happiness in a way that quietly excuses him of all responsibility for his earlier failure as a father and a husband.

Bernard (Hoffman) tries to set things straight between Tommy and Brad

And that's what makes Russell's film inferior to Paul Thomas Anderson's morality plays (Boogie Nights, Magnolia). Anderson gives us characters who suffer the consequences of reckless self-gratification, learn humility, and reach out for help, whereas Russell's Huckabees crowd comes close to justifying destructive behavior in the name of independent intellectual adventures. Anderson's films are about fools finding wisdom and grace, where Huckabees is just about finding a tenuous happiness.

While Albert, Tommy, Brad, and the gang are all portrayed as comical fools who have a lot to learn, the film's gravest error is that it holds up Christians as the biggest idiots of all. Instead of considering Christian faith, Russell instead presents us with a naïve and narrow-minded religious family who claim that Christianity condemns curiosity, and who look at Albert's passion for the environment as ridiculous. Christian viewers should not be too offended by such a cruel caricature, as there are indeed many believers who use Christianity as an excuse to avoid intellectual endeavor, whereas Christ tells us that "He who seeks finds." But Huckabees resurrects a wearying question: Why are so many films that wave the flag of "tolerance" so unforgivingly cruel and intolerant to Christians?

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The Movie Director Who Made Me a Priest	Printer view
In a fascinating and sometimes off-the-wall interview, David O. Russell, director of I ♥ Huckabees, challenged my thinking—but not my faith—and gave me a clerical collar.