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Grade: B+

Verdict: You'll (heart) "Huckabees," too.

By ELEANOR RINGEL GILLESPIE
Cox News Service

I would love to have been a fly on the wall during the studio pitch for the off-the-wall new comedy "I (Heart) Huckabees": Uh, see, there's this schlubby tree-hugger — oh, say Jason Schwartzman — and, um, things are going so badly in his life that he hires a husband-and-wife team of — stay with me — existential detectives (thinking Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin). And then ...

Well, some suit somewhere must've had a little imagination or, perhaps, an affinity for David O. Russell's ("Three Kings," "Flirting with Disaster") eccentric sensibility, because that's exactly the movie Russell has made. And along with "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," it's the most playful, intelligent and original comedy of the year.

A woebegone and unwashed environmentalist named Albert Markovski (Schwartzman) is in a life-and-death struggle to keep his ideas from being co-opted by Brad Stand (Jude Law), the soulless, glad-handing golden boy at the Wal-Mart-like superstore franchise, Huckabees.

For Albert, saving the environment — even the lonely rock he's surrounded with police tape — is everything. For Brad, pretending to care about Albert's environmental thing is a primo way to climb up the Huckabees corporate ladder, where pretending to do anything decent is considered a plus.

Concurrently, Albert has run into the same tall Sudanese man three times in a row. Wanting to find out if it's simply a coincidence or something more cosmic, he hires Bernard and Vivian Jaffe (Hoffman and Tomlin), so-called existential detectives, with a blanket theory of the universe that emphasizes connection. As Bernard demonstrates (literally holding a blanket and moving his hand underneath it), you, me, the Eiffel Tower, a war, a disease, a hamburger — everything is the same, even though its different.

Or something like that.

Tommy Corn (a wild-eyed, funny Mark Wahlberg), a frazzled firefighter obsessed with the evils of petroleum, has left the Jaffes and signed on with their nemesis, Caterine Vauban (Isabelle Huppert, taking haughty French ennui to new heights). A world-weary nihilist and author ("If Not Now" is her newest), she hands out business cards that read "Cruelty. Manipulation. Meaninglessness."

Somewhere in the midst of all this is Naomi Watts as Brad's girlfriend, Dawn, the perky spokesperson for Huckabees.

Russell gives us, among many other things, his version of the glass half empty/glass half full equation. Some of us see gaps, he says; some of us see connections. Though, in a movie as determinedly off-kilter as this one, perhaps chutes and ladders is a better comparison.

"I (Heart) Huckabees" can get a bit too '60s — quirky and whimsical for the sake of being quirky and whimsical. And sometimes, despite all its quick-on-its-feet humor and smarts, the movie tries too hard — and the strain shows.

Still, Russell's sharp screenplay and jauntily inventive direction, plus the chance to see Hoffman, Watts, Tomlin, Law and Wahlberg together in the same scene makes up for a lot of whimsy and quirkiness. Unfortunately, it can't make up for the black hole at the movie's center. Namely, Schwartzman. Nominally the film's protagonist, he's dull and unappealing, no matter how clever the dialogue or how exalted the company he's keeping (though heavyweights like Hoffman, Huppert and the rest probably exacerbate his lack of, well, just about everything).

The picture shifts easily from cosmic absurdity to pure silliness to the walking sight-gag that is Hoffman. With his botched Beatles mop top and leading-with-his-nose performance, he looks like something that's stepped out of an Edward Koren cartoon in the New Yorker. And watching how he and Tomlin navigate a sprinkler system is a brilliant little lesson in character acting.

Yet "I (Heart) Huckabees" is more complex than a collection of varied funny bits. "Everything you could ever want to have or be, you already have and are," Bernard tells Albert.