Strange bedfellows  By B Ruby Rich January 1, 2005 Director
David O. Russell  Director David O. Russell  Comedy and politics
link in I ♥ Huckabees. By B Ruby Rich.  I ♥ Huckabees could be
described as the first post-9/11 comedy. With a dream cast
including Jude Law, Dustin Hoffman, Mark Wahlberg, Lily Tomlin,
Isabelle Huppert and Naomi Watts, it tells the story of the
environmental activist Albert Markovski, who has been
experiencing an alarming series of coincidences and hires a pair
of "existential detectives", a married couple, to help explain
them.  In the screwball chaos that results, Huckabees manages to
deliver radical political messages in eye-popping style.  "This
film comes out of my own DNA," says the director, David O.
Russell. "I actually started working on it back in the 1980s,
while I was living in New York City."  It was a time that would
mark Russell's transition from political activist to filmmaker.
Russell is that rarity among US indie filmmakers: he never went
to film school. Instead, he