So two of the key protagonists in this film are 'existential detectives', which of course immediately had me thinking Sartre and co - which then in turn shaped the way in which I tried to make sense of the Jaffes/Caterine dynamic and the various plights of Albert, Brad, Tommy and Dawn (and the concerns of the film as a whole). But thinking about I ♥ Huckabees afterwards, I realised that the Jaffes were existential detectives - and the film was an existential comedy - in the sense of being concerned with existence at large, rather than with 'existentialism' as a particular strand of Continental thought (despite the suggestive references to Others, 'pure being', etc), and having sorted that out in my head, the whole crazy concoction began to make a bit more sense.
Basically, I think that Huckabees pulls the same trick on us as viewers as do the Jaffes on Albert - it provokes us into stepping out of the framework of our ordinary perceptions of reality (or modes of consciousness). I don't think that all that stuff about whether 'everything is connected' or 'nothing is connected' should be taken too seriously...the pronouncements on those subjects in the film strike me as basically gobbledegook - fond caricatures of philosophical positions rather than attempts at rendering the positions themselves.
The thing is, though, that this fairly windy overt philosophising isn't supposed to represent the philosophy of the film itself (in so far as a film can be said to have a 'philosophy') - rather, it's the essential backdrop against which that 'actual philosophy' can subtly make itself apparent. While I don't feel that Huckabees really purports to provide any answers to the Big Questions, there definitely seemed to be a subtext to the effect that if one were to manage that kind of shift in one's perception of reality, this would be a Good Thing and likely to lead to being better able to deal with the petty irritants of life (not to mention the human drama) and just generally becoming productively reconciled to the Absurdity Of It All...
Of course, it'd be neglectful of me to fail to mention a whole other level on which Huckabees operates - that of comedy. It's a very funny film - or at least I found it so - and I reckon that the faintly absurd/Zen kind of way in which the humour works is an important part of the overall 'program' of the film (akin to the pseudo-philosophising). In the context of Huckabees, the amusing set pieces where Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin very visibly spy on their clients, scurry through lawns while cursing as they're sprayed by water sprinklers, and just generally intrude, are cut of the same cloth - or blanket, so to speak - as the scenes in which bits of people's faces detach and float around in the air; apart from being funny/surreal (two things with more in common than not), both types of scenes visualise a disjuncture in the perception of reality (for us as viewers as much as for Albert as character) and give the film a sense of absurdity which is appropriate to its underlying ideas about the nature of (modern) existence.
And that's not even getting into the importance of coincidences (meaningful and otherwise), the significance of the 'open spaces' theme, the seemingly cheap 'coincidence/hint of the unconscious' inherent in the resemblance between the Jaffes and Albert's parents, and the sheer joy of the sequences where Mark Wahlberg gets all shouty and vulnerable, Naomi Watts loses it (or finds it?) in a bonnet, and Jude Law vomits into his own hand...the more I think about this film, the more I realise how much there is to it (often in an extremely tangled, multi-layered way which I haven't yet properly come to grips with), and the more I like it - not only has it engaged me both intellectually and more viscerally, but it's also managed the trick of causing me to think that the two responses are somehow intimately related, and of making me wonder how everything fits together.
That's a pretty good trick.
