Mark Wahlberg, Lily Tomlin, Dustin Hoffman, and Jude Law in I Heart Huckabees.

Like someone who labors all afternoon over a soufflé only to have it deflate before it ever reaches the dinner table, you have to admire David O. Russell for the sheer ambitiousness of I Heart Huckabees. It's clearly not for lack of trying that this philosophical endeavor ends up collapsing under its own wobbly weight. This is a film whose characters wouldn't dream of shying away from Big Questions about the interconnectedness of the universe and the essential meaningless of reality - they prefer to hack away at weighty theoretical conundrums with large machetes. The characters are philosophers with a taste for blood. But they drown each other out with their competing intellectual battle cries, until dialogue that should come off as earnest, ends up sounding like thinkspeak chatter.

Everything is in here: Sarte as interpreted through Man Ray as interpreted through sex, and so on. Non-sequiturs about time travel and 9/11 are cutely tossed around like footballs; eyebrows are glibly arched in response. Although Huckabees invites its viewer to lie down on the analyst's couch and really think about stuff, the viewer can't help but notice that everything in the office is from Ikea. Are apothecary tables from that yuppie Arcadia meant to trip the wires of meaningful ontological reflection? Or was David Brooks' book, The New Upper Class and How They Got There, meant to render the "Bourgeois Bohemians" (as he puts them, "Bobos") intentionally as the banal, insipid, self-aggrandizing dullards they really are?

Jason Schwartzman is Albert Markovski, the stylishly misunderstood head of a coalition of environmental activists seeking to protect America's vanishing green spaces from the advancements of behemoth corporations like Huckabees, a Wal-Mart-like retail chain. He curses apoplectically when the universe isn't going his way, he writes snide little poems about suburban sprawl, and while it seems that he generally can't figure things out, he possesses at least the certainty that he is confused about whether or not to pursue his activist cause anymore.

Brad Stand (Jude Law) is an upwardly-mobile junior executive at Huckabees. He has great hair, a repertoire of amusing anecdotes that he employs at cocktail parties and board meetings on a rotating basis, and generally has it all figured out. The difference between Brad and Albert is that Albert is a deep thinker while Brad is not.

Albert hires two "existential detectives" who are played by Lily Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman, to help him discover why he keeps running into the same doorman--- a towering African exchange student, whose significance Albert is determined to divine. After signing a contract giving the detectives free reign to spy on him morning and night, Albert realizes that the snoops are probing and analyzing every aspect of his existence except the reoccurring doorman. They even follow him to his job, violating Albert's quid pro quo that the angst-ridden environmentalist's workplace must remain off-limits.

Albert is running the Open Spaces Coalition, whose purpose is to save virgin marshland from being bulldozed. He invites Brad to join his Open Spaces Coalition on behalf of Huckabees. The department store would participate in the conservation effort as a PR move. Brad, who intends to turn the marshland into a parking lot, decides he'd like the detectives to follow him around too-seemingly just for kicks, but really as a means of undercutting Albert's overall confidence by mimicking the environmentalist's quest for the Meaning of it All.

Brad, confident a meddler though he was, is not immune to the insidious effects of probing metaphysicians. His hitherto unruffled world of jet skis and corporate promotions begins to cave in on itself. His dippy girlfriend and Huckabees spokemodel (Naomi Watts) decides she'd like to give existentialism a go-round too, and, soon enough, she's trading her day-glo bikinis for unflattering overalls and wondering if people only like her because she's pretty.

For the viewer, who is forecasting the same conclusion Satre drew in No Exit¸ any message that futility is the outcome whenever one gets caught in the circuitous ponderings of epistemology, never arrives. Instead, a theme combined of self-awareness and the challenge of the self to change is a by product of the drama's absurdity.

Also ricocheting off of the manic frames of the film are Isabelle Huppert's dark French philosophe, who tries to lure Albert away from the Eastern-inspired optimism of Tomlin and Hoffman's detectives with the seduction of nihilism - she suggests he hit himself repeatedly in the face with a large rubber ball if he wants to understand the universe, which he so fervently does. Then there is Tommy Corn, an eco-conscious firefighter played by Mark Walhberg with a touching bewilderment and sincerity that is irritatingly absent from the other characters. If there is a genuine beating heart to be found amid the surrealistic shenanigans and gimmicky digital dream sequences of Huckabees, Tommy is the only character who really has his eye on it.

While his wife is leaving him and his paltry possessions are strewn across the front yard of their former home and he is pathetically clad in only a tattered bathrobe and boxer shorts, his only concern is unselfishly to urge his tiny daughter, "never stop asking questions" about the essential unfairness of life. Albert and Brad seem to be pondering the Big Questions because it's the fashionable thing to do; Tommy seems to have no other choice.

It's hard to love Huckabees, but it's very easy to like it in a vague, cutesified sort of way. Lily Tomlin wears snappy, retro outfits. Dustin Hoffman sports an endearing mop cut and drives a Citroen. People say things like, "Have you ever transcended time and space?" Shania Twain makes fun of herself.

It's just that the end result is less of the towering soufflé that it set out to be, than a handful of very colorful candy.

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