I Heart Huckabees (stylized as I ♥ Huckabees; also I Love Huckabees) is a 2004 independent black comedy film directed and produced by David O. Russell, who co-wrote the screenplay with Jeff Baena.
A self-described "existential comedy", I Heart Huckabees follows a pair of detectives (Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin), hired to investigate the meaning of the life of their clients (Jude Law, Jason Schwartzman, Mark Wahlberg, and Naomi Watts). As the different investigations cross paths, their rival and nemesis (Isabelle Huppert) tries to drag their clients into her own views on the meaning of their lives.
Plot
Young Albert Markovski heads the local chapter of the "Open Spaces Coalition" environmental group. One of their current projects is stopping the building of a new chain store "big-box" department stores, Huckabees.
Albert is a rival of Brad Stand, a shallow executive at Huckabees. Brad infiltrates Open Spaces and charismatically displaces Albert as the leader. Dawn Campbell is Brad's live-in girlfriend and the face and voice of Huckabees, appearing in all of the store's ads.
After seeing the same conspicuous stranger three times, Albert contacts a couple of existential detectives, Bernard and Vivian Jaffe. They offer him their optimistic brand of existentialism—they call universal interconnectivity (combining romantic and transcendentalist philosophies)—and spy on him, ostensibly to help him solve the coincidence. Fireman Tommy Corn is another client of the Jaffes', with an idealistic, obsessively anti-petroleum-industry philosophy. They introduce Albert to Tommy as his 'other', and they become friends.
Tommy grows dissatisfied with the Jaffes, feeling they are not helping. Seeking out other possibilities, he ends up abandoning (and undermining) the Jaffes by introducing Albert to Caterine Vauban, a former student of the Jaffes who espouses a seemingly opposing nihilistic/absurdist philosophy.
Caterine teaches them to disconnect their inner beings from their daily lives and problems, to synthesize a non-thinking state of "pure being." Lifted from their troubles, they wish to keep that feeling forever. But she says it is inevitable to be drawn back into human drama, and the core truth of it is misery and meaninglessness. To prove her point, Caterine takes Albert into the woods to have sex, leaving Tommy behind. He finds out about it and feels hurt. She tells him that they found each other through all of the human suffering and drama. Tommy rejects this idea and leaves them, furious and lost.
Meanwhile, in Brad's further attempts to undercut Albert, he and Dawn meet with and are influenced by Bernard and Vivian. In the following days, Brad and Dawn rethink their entire lives: she rejects the modeling world, looking for deeper meaning, while he realizes his whole ascent up the corporate ladder is meaningless, as he has focused his whole life on trying to please others and not himself.
All the storylines collide when Brad's house catches fire. While the fire trucks get stuck in a traffic jam, Tommy arrives on his bicycle to put out the fire, which also trapped Dawn inside. As he saves her life, they fall in love. Meanwhile, Brad despairs at the destruction of his home, the symbol of his material success. Albert attains a sort of enlightenment when he synthesizes the two opposing outlooks of the Jaffes and Caterine to realize the cosmic truth of everything.
Brad, meanwhile, is fired from Huckabees, leaving him rudderless. Albert reveals to him that the fire started when he burned Brad's jet skis, then it spread to the rest of the house. He says they are no different, that everything really is inextricably connected, but that these connections necessarily arise from the often senselessly painful reality of human existence. Having realized this, he refers Brad to Caterine, believing she can help him as she did Albert and Tommy.
Albert and Tommy talk later about everything that has happened. Caterine and the Jaffes watch them from afar, concluding they can close both of their cases.