October 7-13, 2004

movies

Work of

by Sam Adams

Most Rushmore fans looked at Jason Schwartzman's Max Fisher and saw a reflection of their inner geek, but David O. Russell looked at Schwartzman and saw an activist in the making. "I'm one of those guys who says, let's do it: Let's form a club, let's hand out flyers. That's why I loved that character so much," he said at the Toronto Film Festival last month.

It helps that Russell was an activist before becoming a filmmaker. A college paper on the U.S.-sponsored coup in Chile helped radicalize the young Russell, who promptly moved to Nicaragua to bear witness to the revolution in progress. "Disillusioned" by the Sandinistas' rigid Marxism, Russell was still energized by the scent of change. "I came back and I wasn't afraid to stand in a parking lot handing out flyers to clean up a toxic waste dump in Maine."

I Huckabees is billed as "an existential comedy," and Russell stresses that he wanted to make a relatively light film after the dark satire of Three Kings. But at the same time, he wanted to explore, well, the nature of consciousness, influenced by his long study of Zen Buddhism. (Dustin Hoffman's shaggy "existential detective" is explicitly modeled on Russell's onetime Amherst prof, renowned Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman.) That might sound like heavy stuff for a light comedy, but Russell says it ain't necessarily so. "These ideas are kind of implicitly fun," he says. "As a Zen monk once said, "If you're not laughing, you're not in on the joke.' It's a pretty big joke."

Jokes don't get much bigger than the universe, and Huckabees' outlandish subject matter demanded an unorthodox production. An on-set account in The New York Times described the Huckabees set as something close to chaos, with Russell screaming profanity at his actors to keep them off balance and working out with his personal trainer half-naked in between takes. But even in its origins, Huckabees was unusual. Russell began not long after Three Kings with a script, to star Schwartzman, Mark Wahlberg and Lily Tomlin, set in an Upper West Side zendo, but decided after years of work that the approach was all wrong. Schwartzman recalls getting a phone call at 6 in the morning telling him, "It's not going to work, but we will work together some day."

The working together started long before principal photography: After reading the first draft of the Huckabees' script, Schwartzman was hooked, and as Russell and co-writer Jeff Baena worked on subsequent versions, Schwartzman went to Russell's house "every day" for more than a year, reading new drafts, talking, sometimes just hanging out in the bean bag chairs. As if that weren't preparation enough, Russell scribbled down some nature-loving poetry and told Schwartzman to fly to Secaucus and give a reading outside a strip mall, as his character does in the film. Schwartzman was not alone among the cast in not knowing where all this would lead, but he always had faith in Russell's vision, even if he couldn't tell what it was. "You trust that he knows what he wants, even if it doesn't make sense to you," he says. "You know when you walk into someone else's room and it looks like a mess to you, but they know where everything is?"

Wahlberg, whose character makes up the other half of Huckabees' heart, didn't spend as much time in the bean bags, but he did spent six months talking to Russell about "myself, my feelings on different issues." His own concerns, Wahlberg says, have more to do with the future of inner-city kids than his character's obsession with petroleum products, but this rare comic turn is "as close to me getting to do my thing" as anything he's ever done. Wahlberg takes issue with the suggestion that Huckabees' Tommy Corn might be an extension of the disillusioned U.S. soldier he played in Three Kings, but adds, "If it were 10 years later, I think Troy Barlow would be asking some of these questions."

And speaking of questions, and of Three Kings, what happened to Soldiers Pay, the half-hour documentary Russell filmed for Warner Bros. pre-election DVD rerelease of Three Kings, which the distributor shitcanned for political reasons (sorry, "production issues")? The film, which includes interviews with soldiers who have served and continue to serve in Iraq, will be released in theaters and to DVD by Cinema Libre, whose list of left-leaning films includes Uncovered: The War in Iraq.

Russell took his argument with Warner Bros. very public before the festival, and although his line now is that he's grateful that the company ceded the rights back to him, he still calls the brouhaha "ridiculous. It's people speaking themselves—it's not like Fahrenheit 9/11. It's just soldiers, a general, Iraqis, just giving in words what their views are on what went down, and what is going down."

Is Russell upset that at this critical juncture, his existential comedy is sliding smoothly into theaters while his explicitly political documentary has had a bumpy ride? No question. But he hardly thinks Huckabees is apolitical. "I think it's a political act to inquire into the nature of consciousness, and not just to accept everyday consciousness per se," he says. "Why would you let your mind be on automatic pilot?" Besides, he adds, "comedy is how we survive. And if we lose on Nov. 2, that's how I'll survive."