COMEDY FOR THE HEAD, NOT HEART

REVIEWED - I HEART HUCKABEES: We have learned to expect the unexpected from David O. Russell, the bright writer-director of Spanking the Monkey, Flirting With Disaster and Three Kings, and he delivers another disarmingly offbeat original in his fourth feature, I Heart Huckabees, writes Michael Dwyer.

Jason Schwartzman (from Rushmore) plays Albert, an earnest environmental activist and poet who consults Vivian and Bernard Jaffe (Lily Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman), a married couple self-described as "existential detectives".

The protagonists also include Jude Law as a self-obsessed executive (named Brad Stand) who's climbing the corporate ladder as a retail chain named Huckabees; Naomi Watts as his girlfriend and the company's model; Mark Wahlberg engagingly playing a soul-searching firefighter; singer Shania Twain as herself; and Isabelle Huppert as a brusque French philosopher who is the arch-rival of the Jaffes.

We're close to Charlie Kaufmann territory here, with more than a few nods to Buddhism, Buñuel, Magritte and Preston Sturges, as Russell serves up oodles of surreal humour, screwball slapstick, absurdist behaviour, playful language, philosophical banter, intellectual pretensions, and reflections on being and nothingness.

The experience is comparable to gorging oneself on hors d'oeuvres at a party rather than having a proper dinner. Ultimately, there is less to it than meets the eyes and ears, although this only becomes fully apparent after seeing the movie and reflecting on it. The linking narrative, which is, perhaps inevitably, sprawling and laden with coincidences, begins to feel less substantial than it seemed, and there is a certain coldness to its calculated schemes.

Russell almost gets away with disguising this by delivering so many entertaining surprises and ensuring that so much is happening in the movie all the time, driving it along at a satisfyingly brisk pace while the eclectic ensemble cast performs with gusto.