C

The baleful influence of Charlie Kaufmann hovers over “I Heart Huckabees,” a cerebral comedy that’s too anxious to demonstrate how clever and erudite it is to bother creating sympathetic characters or a narrative that’s more than an affected faux-philosophical puzzle. Even the title, which replaces the word “love” with one of those cute little hearts familiar from so many slogans nowadays, comes across as affected. To be sure, the picture boasts a starry cast that gamely keeps up with the energetic pace set by writer-director David O. Russell, and it has its share of bright and witty moments, but they never add up to very much–as is true of most of Kaufmann’s overpraised confections. Coming from the creator of “Spanking the Monkey,” “Flirting With Disaster” and “Three Kings”–all of them superior to this–“Huckabees” is a disappointment, though not one without occasional compensations.

The movie can be described as an existential farce centering on Albert Markovski (Jason Schwartzman), who serves as kind of the nucleus around whom the various other characters circulate like particles in a cinematic atom, periodically bumping into one another and setting off unpredictable sparks of energy. (So long as quantum mechanics is one of the topics sent up along the way, one might as well take advantage of the opportunity it affords.) Albert is the head of the local chapter of an environmental group called Open Spaces Coalition, and feels threatened by Brad Strand (Jude Law), a slickly duplicitous executive at the massive Huckabees store chain, whose charismatic ways and promises to protect an endangered marshland threaten to displace Markovski’s leadership in his organization. Already stressed out by this, Albert is further unnerved by a series of coincidences in which he repeatedly bumps into a gangly African man. To discover the deeper meaning of his unplanned encounters with the fellow, Albert enlists the help of “existential detectives” Bernard and Vivian Jaffe (Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin), a couple of oddball investigator/therapists who espouse a philosophical notion of the interconnectedness of all being and undertake to solve the riddle his coincidences represent by intrusively looking into every aspect of his life and providing him with an “other”–Tommy (Mark Wahlberg), a short-tempered but well-intentioned fireman turned environmentalist, especially on the subject of oil usage. (Tommy insists on riding a bicycle to blazes, rather than the gas-guzzling truck.) Markovski’s “treatment,” however, is endangered when Brad hires the Jaffes, too, which leads somehow to a breakdown in his relationship with his girlfriend Dawn (Naomi Watts), the statuesque Huckabees PR spokesperson, who suddenly adopts a simple lifestyle that makes her look like a character from “Green Acres.” The complications multiply when the Jaffes’ erstwhile pupil Caterine Vauban (Isabelle Huppert), now a famous author who’s renounced their integrationist ideas in favor of a “heretical” philosophy of anarchic individualism, shows up to offer Albert and Tommy an alternate worldview, and a sort of existential chaos threatens.

It should be clear from all this that Russell, together with co-writer Jeff Baena, is playing around with philosophical and political issues that many people take with intense seriousness, using them as the filigree of what’s essentially (pun intended) a wild screwball comedy, a sort of French bedroom farce in which the doors that slam are more figurative than literal and the entrances and exits are played out on a much larger out-of-door canvas. The problem is that for all the frantic motion, the movie doesn’t really go anywhere, and the characters are mere stick figures of farce rather than recognizable human beings. In those respects it’s unlike truly sharp satire, which makes a clear point and employs caricature to make it edgier and more abstract. Ultimately “Huckabees” lacks both heart, despite the title (if that’s the moniker’s purpose, it’s a misguided one) and–even more problematically–a comprehensible message, unless it’s that there’s ultimately no meaning at all (which means that in the end it embraces Caterine’s nihilism). It all makes for a viewing experience that’s curiously unsatisfying in spite of all the energy on display. That doesn’t mean that the film doesn’t have some hilarious moments and winning performances. A dinner that Albert and Tommy share with the African fellow’s host family, headed by Richard Jenkins and Jean Smart, turns into an amusingly rambunctious argument, and an off-the-wall sequence featuring Talia Shire and Bob Gunton as Albert’s parents has an exuberantly loony quality. Much of the work of Hoffman and Tomlin is also very funny; his ebullient optimism and her goofy intensity go well together, and it’s great to see both of them having fun. But Schwartzman never goes beyond a sort of generalized petulance, which leaves a good deal of the picture fairly flat (though Wahlberg juices things up with his barmy enthusiasm); and although Law shows spirit, as well as a winning smile, Brad’s part in the great scheme of things–and all the material involving him and Watts’s Dawn–seems unconnected and rather peripheral. The picture is well made, though. Peter Deming’s widescreen lensing is crisp and the production design by K.K. Barrett quite striking. There’s also a bright, supportive score by Jon Brion that gives the action a degree of charm it wouldn’t otherwise possess.

The end result, though, is like a beautifully appointed perpetual motion machine with all sorts of bells and whistles but no purpose beyond empty activity. “I Heart Huckabees” has the illusion of depth, but it’s an entirely surface phenomenon–and though the surface is a flashy one, when you penetrate it all that one finds, as “The Neverending Story” might say, is The Nothing.