I Heart Huckabees

I Heart Huckabees (stylized as i ♥ huckabees; also I Love Huckabees) is a 2004 philosophical comedy-drama film directed and produced by David O. Russell, who cowrote the screenplay with Jeff Baena.

A self-described "existential comedy", I Heart Huckabees follows a pair of detectives (Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin) hired to investigate the meaning of the life of their clients (Jude Law, Jason Schwartzman, Mark Wahlberg and Naomi Watts). As the different investigations cross paths, their rival and nemesis (Isabelle Huppert) tries to drag their clients into her own views on the meaning of their lives.

Young Albert Markovski heads the local chapter of the "Open Spaces Coalition" environmental group. One of their current projects is stopping the building of a new "big-box" department store, Huckabees.

Albert is a rival of Brad Stand, a shallow executive at Huckabees. Brad infiltrates Open Spaces and charismatically displaces Albert as the leader. Dawn Campbell is Brad's live-in girlfriend and the face and voice of Huckabees, appearing in all the store's ads.

After seeing the same conspicuous stranger three times, Albert contacts a couple of existential detectives, Bernard and Vivian Jaffe. They offer him their optimistic brand of existentialism—they call it universal interconnectivity (similar to romantic, transcendentalist, and many Eastern philosophies)—and spy on him, ostensibly to help him solve the coincidence. Fireman Tommy Corn is another client of the Jaffes', with an idealistic, obsessively anti-petroleum-industry philosophy. They introduce Albert to Tommy as his "other", and they become friends.

Tommy grows dissatisfied with the Jaffes, feeling they are not helping. Seeking other possibilities, he ends up abandoning (and undermining) the Jaffes by introducing Albert to Caterine Vauban, a former student of the Jaffes who espouses a seemingly opposing nihilistic/pessimist philosophy.

Caterine teaches them to disconnect their inner beings from their daily lives and problems; to synthesize a non-thinking state of "pure being". Lifted from their troubles, they wish to keep that feeling forever. However, she says it is inevitable to be drawn back into human drama, and the core truth of it is misery and meaninglessness. To prove her point, Caterine takes Albert into the woods to have sex, leaving Tommy behind. He finds out about it and feels hurt. She tells him that they found each other through all the human suffering and drama. Tommy rejects this idea and leaves them, furious and lost.

Meanwhile, in Brad's further attempts to undercut Albert, he and Dawn meet with and are influenced by Bernard and Vivian. In the subsequent days, Brad and Dawn rethink their entire lives; she rejects the modeling world, looking for deeper meaning, while he realizes his whole ascent up the corporate ladder is meaningless, for he has focused his whole life on trying to please others and not himself.