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HUMAN NATURE Send This Review to a Friend
Get ready for a wild, entertaining and provocatively creative ride, thanks to the imagination of writer Charlie Kaufman ("Being John Malkovich"), director Michel Gondry and proficient performers who seem attuned to the oddball events that add up to a commentary on the state of the human species. Frequent moments of inventive comedy merge with the more serious observations, and "Human Nature" turns out to be absolutely different from any movie around. It deserves to become a topic of conversation.
You can get an inkling of what’s afoot from the cast of characters. Patricia Arquette gamely fulfills what may be her best role to date as Lila Jute, a woman with a rare condition that causes hair to grow all over her body. She attempts to solve her problem by bonding with nature and taking to the woods, where animals don't care what kind of hair one has. Rhys Ifans has the gift of a showy role as Puff, who was kidnapped as a child by a nut who thought he was an ape and raised Puff in the forest as an ape. Puff is subsequently discovered and the focus of national attention. Tim Robbins is Nathan Bronfman, a scientist who, after an oppressive childhood, devotes his time in a lab to teaching mice table manners. Mirando Otto is ultra sexy as Gabrielle, who speaks in a thick, come-on French accent and tantalizes Nathan as his assistant.
Nathan takes up with Lila but is unaware of the hair problem, which Lila has hidden with an assist from Rosie Perez as hair removal specialist Louise. Nathan and Lila discover Puff and Nathan houses him in lab cage to teach him to act like a human being, a project that produces much comedy and enables the immensely talented and attractive Ifans to steal the picture. There are complications galore and the film shifts back in forth in time, with Nathan talking to us from his heavenly way station after being shot to death, and Puff testifying before Congress in a scene laden with satire. Supporting performers include Robert Forster and Mary Kay Place as Nathan's rigid parents.
The entanglements that the screenplay provides pepper the film with confrontations between humans and nature and focus on such issues as the sex drive, human gullibility, deceptiveness, duplicity and assorted other characteristics. Ultimately the film is quite cynical, according to the way in which some plots lines are worked out. Visually, the film is always intriguing, with high marks going to director of photography Tim Maurice Jones and production designer K. K. Barrett. There are some wonderfully loony animation shots of mice learning to eat with the right fork. In some ways the film may be biting off more than it can easily chew, but its range of imagination and its effort to make audiences think while entertaining them royally are what make "Human Nature" so special. A Fine Line Features release.
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