Cogito Ego Summation (Wherein I Hmmm Huckabees, Tarnation, Dig)

Instead of answering the old question about whether or not the tree falling in the forest, without witness, makes a sound, David O. Russell’s I ♥ Huckabees levels entire forests in an effort to make you stop listening.

Albert Markovski (Jason Schwartzman, the kid from Rushmore) goes to a pair of existential detectives (Lily Tomlin, Dustin Hoffman) to solve a series of coincidences he’s recently experienced.  An ardent, but ineffective, poet-slash-environmentalist, Albert has been going toe-to-toe with Targetesque department store Huckabees over a tract of land; store rep Brad (Jude Law) wants to go the poetry-less, Shania Twain-filled “working within the system” approach to preserving open space.  Meanwhile, Mark Wahlberg is a dysfunctional firefighter who blames everything on the world’s petroleum consumption.  In another plot development, Naomi Watts is very, very hot. 

Along the way, there’s a lot of frantic yelling, frantic running around, and frantic bike-riding.  The film’s attempt at a hyperkinetic Zen makes it almost the antithesis to something like Why Has Bodhi Dharma Left for the East?  Which in this day and age, might be exactly the last thing we need.  The movie introduces substantial topics, kicks them about in a sort of slapstick way, and then dismisses them without so much as a thought.

Which is, fundamentally, the problem with Huckabees:  Like some bastardization of Descartes, it is, therefore it thinks it’s thinking.

Take Russell’s existential detectives:  Dustin Hoffman, purportedly based on famed Buddhist prof (and Uma’s dad) Robert Thurman, is a holistic guru – everything is interconnected, nothing is meaningless.  His partner/wife, Tomlin... well, she does the legwork (sometimes, God help us, in a push-up bra), but brings no additional argument or point of view; in a film that wants you to believe it has enough ideas to go around, it consistently comes up short.

The movie’d love to have you think it was a dialectical discussion between Hoffman’s holistic approach (which would benefit from some serious tea time spent with Douglas Adams’ Dirk Gently) and that of his nemesis, Catarine Vauban (Isabelle Huppert).  Vauban – put forth as the dark side of the farce – believes that pure reality lies in individualism, and that we’re dragged down by human drama and other worldly matters.  Or... the movie could be a dialectical conflict between the erudite, uncompromising Albert and the materialistic, compromised spirit of corporate nyuck-nyuck Brad.  Or...

The one thing the movie proves, without argument, is that Huppert’s presence alone makes a movie.  Though most of the other actors struggle with characters that are as ill-defined as the movie’s discussions – Hoffman mostly looks amused, Tomlin tries to use sharp comic timing to hide unfunny lines, Law is busy struggling with his accent, Schwartzman is wholly ineffective, and Watts, like her character, looks like she just wants more – Huppert imposes simply by appearing.  Though Jean Smart and Richard Jenkins have a single decent scene, the only other actor who makes a mark is – shockingly – Wahlberg, whose predictable character becomes comfortably reliable, whose belligerence is responsible for most of the movie’s few laughs.

Oh,  I don’t hate Huckabees, but I certainly don’t ♥ it, either.  Its busywork sophistry is amusing, if unconvincing; its unpredictability interesting, if uninvolving. While it smartly doesn’t seek to solve the nature of the universe, it frustrates in its refusal to decide whether it’s a forum for philosophy or psychology, comedy or pathos.  That could be because, like the titular entity (The Huckabees slogan is “The Everything Store!”) the movie wants to be about everything.  .

But Huckabees is really about Russell.  David O., not Bertrand.

One of the taglines for the movie has been one of its best quips, “You can’t deal with my infinite reality, can you?”  A better one, spoken by Naomi Watts’ character but apropos to all, would be “Look at me!  Don’t look at me, don’t look at me.  Look at me!”

Albert Markovski, the center of the film, is a pathetic, empty soul desperately seeking attention.  This is supposedly his journey towards understanding and happiness, and while he manages to acquire both some sense of self and selflessness, he accomplishes it by filling a lot of screen space.  Russell’s had a short, varied body of work – Three Kings, Spanking the Monkey – but a good bit of Huckabees feels like a high-falutin’ (okay, well, medium-falutin’)version of his superb family values comedy Flirting with Disaster.  Both movies, while riddled with bizarre asides, have insecure protagonists dealing with parental problems.  And here’s where Huckabees’ real dialectic is:  The existential detectives and Vauban are the daffy, rumpled and oedipal ideals that Alan Alda and Tomlin played in Disaster; Markovski’s real parents (Talia Shire (Schwartzman’s real mother) and Bob Gunton) are the disinterested, emotionally distant counterparts to Disaster’s Mary Tyler Moore and George Segal.  It would not be too much of a leap, as Russell’s revisited this theme twice in four films (thrice, if you want to parallel Markovski’s tryst with Vauban and the mother-son incest of Monkey) to say that Russell’s got serious mommy-daddy issues, and he’s working them out through his work.

There is one single scene where Huckabees pauses to contemplate:  Law, slowly coming unhinged, rhetorically asks, “How am I not myself?”  The phrase is then chanted, mantra-like, by Tomlin and Hoffman.

It’s a question answered early on in Tarnation, a home-movie self-portrait by Jonathan Caouette:  He’s not himself when he’s lying to the camera, as some painfully false set-up scenes show. 

A troubled history of physical abuse, substance abuse and madness pervades a mostly textual introduction:  Born to a mother who was undergoing shock treatments, Jonathan was manhandled in several foster homes; once, when in the care of his own mother, he bore witness to her rape.  All of this is tragic... but the first ten minutes of the movie basically form a slideshow, with onscreen text over still family photos.

Then the movie stops play-acting and starts being, as we’ve been taught to say, real.  Young Jonathan got a video camera, and started filming himself.  Tarnation’s first bit of old footage is an extended monologue, an eleven year-old Caouette playing the role of an abused housewife.  Instantly, the movie becomes a living, involving thing; the boy has such an obvious amount of intelligence, talent and pain that detached sympathy becomes impossible.

It’s difficult to call Tarnation a documentary.  It is nothing so simple as a personal collage or a video diary, nor something self-aggrandizing as a promo reel.  It is self-expression of the highest order:  Tarnation is Jonathan Caouette, Jonathan Caouette is Tarnation.  This is what great art can do:  It takes you into someone else’s head, shows you someone else’s world view.

That world view involves – like last year’s best film, Capturing the Friedmans – uncomfortably intimate home video footage.  But it has very consciously been edited and manipulated by the filmmaker, combined with other sounds and images to convey his own fractured funhouse mirror of a mind:  iMac-distorted photos mingle with the casts of Rosemary’s Baby and “Zoom,” while Low’s haunting music gives way to the sounds of Caouette’s high school-produced stage musical adaptation of Blue Velvet (!). 

Unlike Russell’s whining put-on, Caouette’s film seems an honest, desperate struggle to make sense of things.  It can be terrifying stuff to witness; it can also be joyous, and brought to mind James Dickey’s review of Fred Exley’s A Fan’s Notes:  “This is the horrible and hilarious account of a long failure, but a failure which turns into success:  the success that this book is.”  Tarnation is that same sort of triumph.

The next question, of course, is “How many Tarnations could we sit through?”  A short troll through the blogverse or a quick surf through reality television reveals a nation obsessed with self-expression.  Now that it’s evident anyone with a couple hundred bucks and some video editing software can make a feature film, are the arthouses going to be overrun with indulgent cries for attention?  Will people hand out introductory DVDs instead of business cards and résumés?

I suspect that, with the recognition Caouette’s movie is getting, we might be more open to such a development.  Portraiture on film is something as old as the medium itself; in contrast, narrative seems the unnatural imposition.  Tarnation is hardly the first of a genre, and while it might inspire the revival of a movement, it doesn’t deserve the blame for all the substandard work that is sure to follow.  Every genre has its good, bad, and horrible.  With luck, we might get a few more as good as Tarnation...

...and quite frankly, I look forward to seeing some of the really awful ones, the ones where the subjects won’t be able to show their faces, after so much showing-of-face.

Here’s a prediction:  In the Home of the Future, there will be a closet-sized area set aside where denizens can monkey-do what they’ve been taught on Reality TeeVee.  Yes, every house will have bathrooms, bedrooms, living rooms... and a confessional room.

Dig, which won the award for best feature documentary at this year’s Sundance Festival, is more standard doc fare.  Too standard, actually:  It’s basically what “Behind the Music” would be if VH1 didn’t think its viewers idiots.

The profile of The Brian Jonestown Massacre and The Dandy Warhols, two bands who share a friendship and a style, is watchable enough.  The conceit is that the BJM is a brilliant but overlooked band, the Dandys blander and more successful.  There are some intriguing characters here, especially BJM mastermind Anton Newcombe.  It’s a blast watching him fight – with words and fists – fellow band members on stage in scenes straight from the Spinal Tap playbook.

The problem with the movie is that its conceit is false:  Sure, The Dandys, who had one hit in the U.S. (remember that chorus, “Heroin is so passé?”) hit it big... in Europe; in reality, they’ve produced four moderately acceptable albums.  Newcombe’s band is no stunner, either.  People throughout the movie – mostly A&R reps who are used to taking through their Dockers – gush superlatives all over Anton.  He’s a genius.  He’s brilliant.  He’s like a one-man Velvet Underground.  Guess what?  The music that he – and the Dandys – specialize in is neopsychedalia.  What’s so special about that?  Who ever heard of an innovative revivalist?

The Landmark Sunshine theater, where I saw Dig, was handing out BJM samplers.  The first song (“Who?”) starts off with the following lyrics:  “I see yellow, I see orange, I see green, I see blue/ I see every color that there’s ever been inside of you.”  See that, Anton?  That thar’s creosote brown, and it’s coming right up.

Genius minus Talent leaves Ego, and that’s what the movie serves up in large amounts.  Newcombe is obsessed with the Dandys’ success because he’s brilliant –no one gets him, everyone else is a burden, the world is ten years behind him (even if he’s playing thirty-year-old  music).  The Dandy’s songwriter/singer/guitarist Courtney Taylor-Taylor throws hissy fits at labels who don’t sell enough of his records, and video directors who don’t get his vision.  In the end, we get the feeling that the only reason for the Dandys’ modicum of success is that they’re able to put their ego aside just long enough to sign the necessary paperwork.

All of which is a dated and depressing view of the music industry.  The indie music scene is bigger business, and full of more integrity, than ever.  While major labels collapse under the fallacies both bands assail in the movie – impatient short-sightedness, wasteful spending, an abundance of useless, spineless middle-men, the desperate pursuit of hit singles and only hit singles (really, all the same things that plague Hollywood, right now) – the Internet has allowed independent labels and bands to market themselves directly to customers, bypassing the big-money machinations of radio and corporate distribution. 

So Dig arrives on the scene feeling as dated as the BJM/Dandy sound.

Yeah, this is why I see movies in NYC:  So I can wait to write about them until a half-week after they’ve opened wide.  Sigh. 

I actually saw Huckabees a second time, just so I could refresh my memory.  And the previews included:  Alfie, starring Jude Law, and Closer, starring Jude Law.  Finally, the feature, starring Jude Law, rolled.

Note about Closer:  It looks like Jude Law bags Julia Roberts and Clive Owen gets Natalie Portman, or vice versa, or all combinations thereof.  This is a serious problem:  The Brits are stealing our women!

I don’t know about you, guys, but I’m going to start working on my accent.

Cheers.

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