I Heart Huckabees

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

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

Plot

Albert Markovski (Jason 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. Albert is a rival of Brad Stand (Jude Law), a shallow power executive at Huckabees. Brad infiltrates Open Spaces and charismatically displaces Albert as the leader. Dawn Campbell (Naomi 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 (Dustin Hoffman) and Vivian Jaffe (Lily Tomlin). The detectives offer Albert their optimistic brand of existentialism—they name it universal interconnectivity (which has some tenets of romantic and transcendentalist philosophies)—and spy on him, ostensibly to help him solve the coincidence. Bernard and Vivian introduce Albert to Tommy Corn (Mark Wahlberg), an obsessively anti-petroleum firefighter. Tommy is assigned to Albert as his Other.