I Heart Huckabees

I ♥ Huckabees (known usually as I Heart Huckabees but also as I Love Huckabees) is a 2004 philosophical comedy film from Fox Searchlight. It was produced and directed by David O. Russell, who co-wrote the screenplay with Jeff Baena.

The film stars Jason Schwartzman, Dustin Hoffman, Lily Tomlin, Jude Law, Isabelle Huppert, Mark Wahlberg and Naomi Watts.

Plot

Albert Markovski (Schwartzman) is a young man who heads the local chapter of an environmental group, the "Open Spaces Coalition." One of their current projects is an attempt to stop the building of a new Huckabees store, a chain of "big-box" department stores akin to Wal-Mart or Target (Mike Huckabee was the governor of Arkansas, Wal-Mart's home state, at the time of the film's release). Albert is a rival of Brad Stand (Law), a shallow power executive at Huckabees. Brad infiltrates Open Spaces and charismatically displaces Albert as the leader. Dawn Campbell (Watts) is Brad's live-in girlfriend and the face and voice of Huckabees; she appears in all of the store's commercials.

After seeing the same conspicuous stranger three times, Albert contacts two existential detectives, Bernard and Vivian Jaffe (Hoffman and Tomlin). The detectives offer Albert their optimistic brand of existentialism—they name it universal interconnectivity (this has some tenets of romantic or even transcendentalist philosophies)—and spy on him, ostensibly to help...
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