Part 2: Russell, the new Scorsese?

For the first half of this two-part look at David O. Russell’s new film, “I (Heart) Huckabees,” look below.

As for “I (Heart) Huckabees,” Russell tries to take us on a trek through an examination of nothing less than the nature of existence.

Using visual techniques similar to those that David Fincher employed in “Fight Club,” adopting the offbeat comic tone reminiscent both of Wes Anderson (“The Royal Tenenbaums”) and the screenplays of Charlie Kaufman (“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”) and resorting to the mean-spirited moments so loved by Todd Solondz (“Happiness”), Russell has made a film that feels like a graduate seminar in the collected works of Jean-Paul Sartre .

Yeah, it’s funny. Mark Wahlberg has never been funnier as a firefighter so enraged at the utter contradiction of 21st-century life that he rides a bicycle to fires (to avoid wasting “petroleum”). Lily Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman play a pair of “existential detectives” who find a “connectedness” between everything, while Isabelle Huppert is their foil, having adopted the position that all life is meaningless.

Russell keeps the movie moving so fast from one sequence to the next, using glib dialogue (“You can’t deal with my infinite nature, can you?”) to punctuate his visual sequences, that you aren’t likely to ask until much later, “What does it all mean?”

My point: In the works of the filmmakers listed above, you are invited to find conclusions on your own. Russell, however, shuttles you down a chute toward the specific messages that he wants to convey. And - to carry this ridiculous bovine metaphor to its logical end - he hurries you along with ongoing bursts from his own intellectual cattle prod .

Of course, Monsieur Sartre would know more about that. And if not him, then certainly Herr Kafka .