Both eastern philosophy and existentialism allow for the confirmation of our existence by an other or others. Caterine’s philosophy is actually more extreme than anything someone like Sartre would typically say. In “Existentialism and Humanism,” Sartre wrote that “every truth and every action imply both an environment and a human subjectivity” (26). He noted that although people were calling existentialism pessimistic, there was more pessimism in ordinary common sense, which often embodies fear of authority and admonition not to defy tradition, and that existentialism—a form of thought for technicians and philosophers—represented a rather severe optimism. “Existence comes before essence” (27)—which meant, he explained, that “man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world—and defines himself afterwards” (28)—there is no god and no human nature. The choices of men—and women—inevitably have the weight of symbolism, as they are possible ways of being in the world for others. There can be a certain anguish in this (and, I think, exhilaration); and the anguish does not prevent action, though it may accompany it. Sartre wrote that “feeling is formed by the deeds that one does; therefore I cannot consult it as a guide to action” (34); and “You are free, therefore to choose—that is to say, invent. No rule of general morality can show you what you ought to do: no signs are vouchsafed in this world” (34). Sartre affirms thinking and acting and the comprehensibility of both by others.

Bernard and Vivian go to Brad’s house, making their way around the lawn sprinklers. They look into his trash for clues—clues Brad has planted, such as work by or about Kafka; and inside the house Dawn has found Brad’s poem about unhappiness. She wants to know what the poem and the existential detectives are all about, what they imply about the relationship between Brad and Dawn: she reads the poem as incriminating, just as Tommy Corn’s wife read Tommy’s new beliefs as repudiation. Brad says the detectives, like him, are pro-active; they do and change things. The detectives point out his need to charm. Brad, who inadvertently mentions the pressure for successful people to marry and produce children, and Dawn both admit that their sex life is often brief (eight or nine minutes); she tries to say that quality not quantity is important but, in an obvious Freudian slip, reverses the terms—twice. Brad’s business associates arrive and he goes out, and Dawn is left to talk with the detectives.

Tommy hits Albert in the face with a ball, an exercise suggested by Caterine, in which sensation stops thought—and allows pure being. (It’s a Zen exercise.) “Fantastic,” says Tommy. “I’m free to just exist,” says Albert. They think they can do this hitting always to maintain that feeling. (Does that suggest something about the appeal of physical activity, such as sports; and if so, was Brad’s reference to sportsman Phil Jackson’s philosophy on point? In the book Brad mentioned, Jackson not only writes about the Chicago Bulls basketball team but about Jackson’s appreciation of Zen.) “You cannot stay in this state all day—it’s inevitable you get drawn back to human drama,” says Caterine: we go from pure being to human suffering and back again. Tommy doesn’t quite believe this; and Caterine says she’ll demonstrate the idea—and immediately begins to flirt with Albert, putting her foot into his lap. Caterine and Albert go off into the woods without Tommy. Caterine pushes Albert’s face into a mud puddle; and he covers Caterine’s legs and face with mud and they kiss—it seems a homage and burlesque of Catherine Deneuve in Belle de Jour (Deneuve had been mentioned as a possible Vauban). Albert and Caterine are both soiled, and they accept each other—in this moment, they do not require the pristine or the perfect. Caterine and Albert have sex, doggy-style; and I laughed hysterically at the mud-and-sex scenario the first time I saw it, even as I wasn’t sure if it was really funny (which is to say, it was funny though it defied my own expectations and taste).

Dawn is in overalls and white hair bonnet as Brad leaves for work. “You look ugly,” he tells her. Dawn says she’s been changed by the existential detectives; and mentions she’s filmed some new, different marketing spots for Huckabees. Brad tells her that she doesn’t have to listen to everything the Jaffes say; and she says, “How am I supposed to know which parts to listen to?” (A question that echoes the introduction of various philosophies into our lives; and that indicates her lack of intellectual preparation.) Huckabees does not like the new Dawn or her new spots; and has hired a bosomy young model—they’ll use Dawn’s voice and Heather’s body. Dawn goes on the war path when she learns this—attacking the replacement, mooning a business meeting, and lying on a desk top as Brad tries to talk to her (“I’m in my tree, talking to the Dixie Chicks,” she says). Brad tells her that he only went to the detectives to help get Albert out of the coalition. Dawn asks if he cares about the marsh and woods? He says yes, before telling her to leave the building through the back door because of how she looks.

Tommy is at a fire, then at Albert’s rock, seeming lonely, and then he enters a bedroom where Caterine and Albert have been trysting. He talks about feeling abandoned and asks if Caterine did this just to teach him a lesson, before saying that he’s going to an even darker spiritual place than the one she has supposed; and she’s pleased: she says, “Sublime.” (Caterine whose philosophy is trouble is soon telling Albert that he has to disrupt Brad’s life as Brad disrupted his; and we see Albert lighting fire to a photograph of jet skis—it’s quite nearly a voodoo image.)

Now that Brad has what he wants, control of the coalition—and before the detectives further disrupt his personal life—Brad asks to close his existential case, but they refuse (the contract Brad signed specified the case cannot be closed before resolution; and he would be embarrassed if they pursued breach-of-contract charges). The detectives describe him first as passive-aggressive, then as aggressive-aggressive; and say they’ve been investigating his Cleveland family, and draw attention to his fat brother who collects plastic geckos and to whom Brad has given a car (movement) and shirts (appearance). Jude Law, clever and flirtatious in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and smugly seductive and heartbreakingly remorseful in Alfie, is here, as Brad, a believable corporate suit. The detectives ask him about the stories he likes to tell, such as the Shania sandwich story, and when they play a tape of his repetitive telling of the Shania story, Brad’s self-confidence becomes doubt. “How am I not myself?” he asks; and they repeat the question—and he is left with it and it begins to undermine him and when he’s in an executive meeting and he is asked to tell the Shania story he becomes nauseated. Told by the detectives that his stories are propaganda for himself, for his public image, and unable to contest this, he is in crisis. “Because we no longer know how to be…, we seek to become” says Robert Linssen in Living Zen (99). We see men like Brad or whom we fear are like Brad, all shiny surfaces and shrewdness, slipperiness itself, men who always seem to be saying yes though we cannot always locate their names on a signed agreement. “How am I not myself?” is a question that David Russell told Nathan Lee of Filmmaker magazine, Fall 2004, that he hopes audience members will ask themselves.

Tommy, seeming somewhat depressed, is summoned with his department to a house fire, and he goes on his bike, and is exhilarated by being able to continue to the house when his co-workers are stalled in car traffic. Tommy arrives at the burning house—Brad and Dawn’s—before the rest of the department; and he finds Dawn amid smoke in a bonnet and overalls and they look into each other’s eyes and kiss. The fire, we deduce, has been lit by Albert with Caterine’s encouragement; and they both observe the fire and its aftermath. When Brad arrives home—upset by the detectives’ questioning and his nausea at the board meeting—and sees the fire, Brad cries and Caterine takes a photograph of Brad’s crying face, which she gives to Albert. The photograph may be intended as commemoration of the moment when Albert vanquished his enemy, but in Brad’s sorrow Albert sees his own—and for a moment Albert hallucinates Brad’s face as Albert’s own face (cubistically, surrealistically). Having pursued Caterine’s philosophy, Albert sees the connections Jaffe & Jaffe earlier tried to show him. Albert imagines himself and Brad bonding in joy, an image both silly and brave; and Albert sees the differing philosophies of Caterine and the Jaffes as fragmented and overlapping—and wonders if they were secretly working together.

Brad, torn between accepting and disavowing his new state, goes to the benefit; and he is excluded from the proceedings, just as he made Albert feel excluded from the coalition Albert founded (these are two of several betrayals in the film). Dawn and Tommy find their way to the benefit. “Do you love me with the bonnet?” asks Dawn of Brad, who begins to shake his head, no; and as Tommy likes the bonnet, Dawn feels now more comfortable with Tommy. It seems a moment of bliss between Dawn and Tommy—and it’s unlikely to last, as this is an extreme phase she’s going through. Dawn, who is at the beginning of her spiritual development, has found a dramatic way of signaling her change to the world but she will likely move to integrating her various impulses and ambitions in a more conventional way. Her personal resolution then will be less visible and Tommy will likely doubt its existence—and they’ll fight and part, or so I predict. While Dawn and Tommy are going off on their own, Brad and Albert get on an elevator together—they have been each other’s enemies, and so share a strange intimacy—and they acknowledge their mutual aggression, but the larger world overtakes them. Huckabees has announced plans to protect the marsh but build a mall where the woods are. Brad is condemned by the coalition members. Albert admits to having torched Brad’s jet skis—the fire spread to the rest of the house; and Albert shows Brad the photo of Brad crying, asking, “Who is this, me or you?” It’s an attempt to get Brad to see their shared sorrow, their shared humanity, but Brad merely wants to retrieve the photograph of his own humiliation. Albert gives Caterine’s card to Brad.

Albert and Tommy sit on the rock, near where the film began, and they talk about inner connections that grow from the excrement of human trouble, while the three unnoticed philosophers, Bernard, Vivian, and Caterine, watch (I wondered about the staging of that—whether the two young men would be able to see the philosophers). “What are you doing tomorrow?” asks Tommy. “Thinking of chaining myself to a bulldozer,” says Albert, “Wanna come?” Tommy says, “Sounds good. Should I bring my own chains?” Albert tells him, “We always do,” a statement that seems practical and rich with implications—then the two begin to hit each other in the face with the ball, in search of pure being.

Stanley Kauffmann, before hoping that Russell’s career would resume as it was before Huckabees, wrote in the October 25, 2004 New Republic that the film’s characters “suffer from Russell’s ponderous directing of a screenplay that seems aimed to display his deep-dish erudition rather than to entertain us. (In how many films has Robinson Jeffers been mentioned?) The result is a doughy response to the Mystery of It All rather than, say, a Beckettian comic glimpse of the void. Russell’s inflated ambition has misguided his wit.” Slate’s David Edelstein, who said Russell might be his generation’s most fearless talent, wondered if the film was dead from inception, and described the acting in the film as often cringe-worthy, remarking that Tomlin’s face seemed like a mask. (I thought Tomlin had the wrong kind of make-up when I first saw the film—her face seemed so white and taut, lacking the humanity of Hoffman’s face. However, at a second screening I attended weeks later I saw her pores and a more natural skin tone, and what bothered me at first was no longer a problem. I wonder if the amount of projection light—or something else—was adjusted for the second screening, assuming that all prints of the film were made from the same master.) Huckabees is weirdly impersonal with little genuine love or thought perceptible onscreen, claimed Salon’s Stephanie Zacharek. New York magazine’s Peter Rainer called the film’s philosophy just a cover for slapstick comedy. David Denby called the film a disaster that yet could inspire loyalty, in The New Yorker. David Ansen of Newsweek said the film doesn’t work, though it’s stimulating, and is the kind of film we could use more of, the kind of contradictory response that may suggest the attraction-repulsion some Americans have for an art of ideas.

Russell told Film Comment’s Gavin Smith that he wanted Huckabees to embody a “cinema of ideas. I’ve read Nietzsche and Sartre and Althusser, and all I can say is that I gravitate to the Eastern philosophers. But I like putting it in a secular context, because then all your conventions and assumptions about it aren’t there. I think the ideas stand up on their own” (September/October 2004). (Russell also told the Village Voice’s Dennis Lim that he likes that eastern philosophy never had a witch-burning phase.) One assumes that the films critics like are challenging, but what if that is not true? I had a conversation with an office clerk about a couple of critically acclaimed films that we had seen separately—films I would describe as thoughtful, as meditations on experience, films I loved that she found disappointing, even boring, describing them as prolonged. Of course, critics do like films full of sensation, or heavy drama—in which mood, more than thought, conveys meaning; but I began to wonder if they (if we) like even more films so simple and slowly paced that they (we) can understand everything presented and can project their (our) own preferred ideas onto the films. A film that has its own many ideas, and conveys them with speed, resists such a method of operation. (I know that I have sometimes not tried to articulate a response to films I thought were too complicated.) I am encouraged to pursue this line of thinking when I consider certain critical comments. David Denby wrote, “The director has chaotic group scenes in which everyone is certainly part of everyone else—they glom onto one another, as if with sticky fingers—and he has better moments, when the comedy slows down a bit and he glories in individual quirks” (The New Yorker, October 4, 2004). The better moments are when the comedy slows down? David Edelstein wrote that “the picture moves fast—maybe too fast” (Slate, October 1, 2004). Peter Rainer compared Huckabees to works by directors Wes Anderson, the Coen brothers, Spike Jonze, and writer Charlie Kaufman, works he called “whoopee cushions for the Mensa crowd” in a New York magazine review available online October 6, 2004. Rainer stated, “Russell is hoping that the sheer volume of intellectual dither in this movie will propel audiences into the comedic stratosphere, but even astronauts know that there comes a time to touch down.” How does Rainer know what Russell hopes; and who decides when and how a film should touch down but the director? Why do the critical responses—which should be read in their entirety—of these decent, dependable writers seem unstable?