David O. Russlell’s I Heart Huckabees is a film that examines two opposing viewpoints of the universe: a) all is one, and b) all is nothing. Inexplicably, its final answer is both.

Such is the unsearchable logic of Russell’s (who previously helmed mainstream Hollywood epic Three Kings) quintessential Independent Film that forgets that in order for humankind to search for Life’s Ultimate Meaning, Life has to, you know, have an Ultimate Meaning. The one major difference between this film and Salvador Dali’s Un chien andalou was that the latter knew it was meaningless. That, and Dali knew when to quit (andalou was only a little more than ten minutes long).

The film starts out with a fun premise, and a promising cast to back it up. Jason Schwartzman plays an environmental activist who is searching for meaning in life’s coincidences. As you’d (of course) expect, he finds a husband and wife team (brilliantly portrayed by Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin) who term themselves “existential detectives”—that is, they investigate you to find out what the meaning of your life is. Or what the meaning of Life is. Or what you think the meaning of Life is. Or whatever. Meanwhile, he’s fighting retail giant Huckabees from destroying forests and swampland in order to build more outlets, and is introduced to firefighter Tommy (played by a hilarious Mark Wahlberg), who is similarly concerned about the environment and social justice causes. Jude Law also turns up as a Huckabees exec who serves by turns as a foil and an obsession for Schwartzman’s character.

“Existential Search for Truth” as topic is a well-established one in the narrative arts, but I Heart Huckabees explores this in a sense that is painfully literal. Certainly the meaning of all reality is a worthy question, but Huckabees has trouble exploring it effectively as the film is almost completely divorced from reality. No one in the film behaves in a way that is believable; Russell seems content merely to introduce characters who represent philosophical viewpoints (and underdeveloped ones at that), and then bump them against each other and see what happens. This can lead to some interesting moments, but it turns into simple obnoxious noise more often than not, particularly when the film attempts to examine contemporary sociopolitical debates. How can we be expected to take a film’s concerns for the world seriously when it simultaneously mocks everything in its path and divorces itself entirely from reality—in addition to reducing those outside of its preferred social movements to grotesque caricatures? (Yes, we all hate rich, white, suburban evangelicals, but do we really need to spend an entire ten-minute scene beating a dead stereotype? Talk about pandering to your genre’s target demographic.)

I Heart Huckabees suffers from being a self-important picture that demands your attention. And demands it. And demands it some more. And demands it way too desperately, over the course of its entire hour-and-forty-minute running time. Russell’s thrown everything but the kitchen sink into this film, up to and including a scene of Jude Law nursing Jason Schwartzman at his fake breast. All of his characters are certifiably insane, and he throws subconscious CGI dreams in wherever possible, where simple expositional dialogue would have been much more effective. All the noise turns the “comedy” into an hour and a half of punch line, with no setup.

Going independent gives filmmakers a chance to “take risks” that directors working for major studios can’t, but that doesn’t mean that the independent filmmaker can or should take absolutely every risk he can think of. The reason they call them “risks” in the first place is that they might make your film less palatable. That’s clearly what happened with I Heart Huckabees—there’s a good film in there somewhere, but it’s buried under the noise of a desperate director repeatedly yelling at his audience, “You’re not deep or smart enough to understand this!!!”