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