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"We'll talk when I come over later! This evening! Who the hell knows exactly when?"

Barry Levinson's Envy is one whacked out morality play -- dark, uncomfortable, bizarre and uneven. It feels like the project wasn't originally approached as a comedy but was suffused with comedic elements along the way, which isn't hard to do when your cast includes Ben Stiller, Jack Black, Christopher Walken and Amy Poehler. The resulting effect is difficult to describe. I can put it like this: the film doesn't consistently succeed at anything it attempts, but it always seems to be hitting one target or another. In no particular order.

All credit to Levinson and his writer, Steve Adams, for having the guts to fill the movie with the intentionally inexplicable. The Christopher Walken character, alternately referred to as "The J-Man" and "The Bum," seems to come out of nowhere and then simply run off into the darkness, waving his arms crazily. His style of speech is even more inscrutable than his origin; he's the kind of person who would respond to "I'm gonna go across the street for a minute" with "No. That is incorrect. Follow me." This is somewhat appropriate in the context of the J-Man's role in the story -- he's the physical manifestation of the little green envy goblin who is eating the protagonist alive -- but it makes no literal sense.

That's not all. Far from it. The plot concerns Nick Vanderpark (Jack Black), a long-time aspiring entrepreneur who finally comes up with a brilliant invention: Vapoorize, a spray can containing a substance that magically makes dog doo disappear. At one point, concerned citizens protest Nick's product -- and his wife's run for the State Senate, "or whatever" -- with picket signs demanding "Where does the shit go? We want to know!" One expects a revelation regarding this; maybe the shit actually transports to the river, or something similarly disastrous. I had to laugh, though, when the resolution ditched this payoff entirely, going off in a different direction. Where does the shit go? I still would like to know.

The question then becomes why I'm treating these instances of discontinuity as choices and not as mistakes. The short answer is that I do that whenever possible; a better one, perhaps, is that I believe that Barry Levinson is an intelligent person. Following my general policy of extending filmmakers the courtesy of the benefit of the doubt, I choose to see Envy's nigh-nonsensical weirdness as brilliant wit rather than hapless ineptitude, and will persist in this assertion until Levinson comes to my apartment and calls himself an idiot.

Stiller once again dons his genial loser suit, though his typically amiable character takes on darker overtones as the film proceeds. In fact, Tim Dingman's desperation, and the lengths to which he goes to keep his secrets and maintain his increasingly elaborate deceptions, eventually become fairly unnerving. Envy is at its most interesting when it mixes its bizarre humor with elements that are almost disturbing -- it has a seamless way of doing this, so that it's difficult to determine what part of all this is supposed to be funny.

A direct contrast to Tim's virulent bitterness is Nick, who clearly hasn't earned the ire that his neighbor and best buddy aims in his direction. Though Tim initially refuses to give up the $2000 he needs to get Nick's invention off the ground, Nick treats his old buddy with nothing but respect and generosity after striking it rich. This is an interesting move: Levinson makes his protagonist thoroughly unsympathetic, thereby making the audience react in two different ways simultaneously: we see that Tim is being an utter jerkface, but at the same time recognize that in his place, we would feel and perhaps act in the same way.

Envy is more hit-and-miss than I've thus far indicated -- many of the scenes, most notably an absurdly long climactic speech by the Stiller character, are awkward, unfunny or both. But it's an unusual, vaguely tricky film, and one that's considerably smarter than it seems.