Huckabees movie a real treat

I watched 2004's I Heart Huckabee's movie for the first time recently. It was appropriately taken out from the library, as this movie is quite educating.

The movie combines existential theory and environmentalism in an interesting way I hadn't yet considered. I found it a surprisingly funny, yet thought-provoking movie. It is the type of popular media offering that could serve as a platform for fans to look more into the topics and learn about the issues at hand.

Here's a quick summary: Albert Markovski (Jason Schwartzman) is an environmental activist, leading a coalition that defends open spaces against development by greedy corporations. He has a coincidence in which he meets the same tall African man three separate times, by random chance. When he can't shake the coincidence as meaningless, he visits a husband/wife existential detective team. They proceed to get more involved in Albert's life than he ever imagined, or hoped for. The consequences are both hilarious and profound.

The good guys in this movie are Albert and his sidekick Tommy Corn (Mark Wahlberg). Their ideal values are represented by their shared love for the environment and full-throttle style of promoting those ideals. The bike-riding Corn rampages against petroleum users and corporations.

Though Tommy does come off as a nut-job in the movie, this likable yet mis-guided do-gooder preaches about the connection between individual use of fossil fuels and global warming - a trend the population at large too often ignores.

His theory about interconnectedness between people and the environment is tackled by detective Bernard (Dustin Hoffman). Bernard uses a blanket to explain the existential theory of interconnectedness early in the movie. The blanket represents everything in the universe, and different areas of it might seem shaped differently, but when it comes right down to it, it's all the same stuff on a molecular level - sharing the same energy available within reality.

Bernard's character comes off as a nut-job too. (This movie's characters do resemble a tin of assorted nuts, giving the flick its comedic fuel and fun feel.) But this existential theory is gaining more fodder as new age spirituality becomes more popular, and even has some high-level scientific backing courtesy of the global consciousness project.

So the point the movie makes is that it is no wonder human beings can so easily ignore the connection between themselves and their environment. We've been ignoring the most basic links for far too long - isolating ourselves instead of recognizing the greater whole of which we are but a tiny part.