Human Nature Movie
Storyline
TAGLINES
In the Interest of Civilization... Conform.
A philosophical burlesque, Human Nature follows the ups and downs of an obsessive scientist, a female naturalist, and the man they discover, born and raised in the wild. As scientist Nathan (Robbins) trains the wild man, Puff (Ifans) in the ways of the world - starting with table manners - Nathan's lover Lila (Arquette) fights to preserve the man's simian past, which represents a freedom enviable to most. In the power struggle that ensues, an unusual love triangle emerges exposing the perversities of the human heart and the idiosyncrasies of the civilized mind. Human Nature is a comical examination of the trappings of desire in a world where both nature and culture are idealized.
| Patricia Arquette | Lila Jute |
| Rhys Ifans | Puff |
| Tim Robbins | Dr. Nathan Bronfman |
| David Warshofsky | Police Detective |
| Hilary Duff | Young Lila Jute |
| Stanley DeSantis | Doctor |
| Peter Dinklage | Frank |
| Toby Huss | Puff's Father |
| Daryl Anderson | Congressman |
| Bobby Pyle | Young Puff |
| Chase MacKenzie Bebak | Young Nathan |
| Mary Kay Place | Nathan's Mother |
| Michel Gondry |
6.20 out of 10 (5549 votes)
Visitor Reviews
A Freudian Comedy
posted on 24 Aug 2009Freud stated that all human behavior is determined by primal instincts, such as sex and hunger.Kaufman and Gondry's Human Nature brilliantly explores this notion, and it is a blast to watch.This is one of the funniest, most intelligent films I have ever seen about human relationships...if Woody Allen and Salvador Dali ever collaborated on a film, it would look something like Human Nature.What makes this film so brilliant is that it explores so many intelligent themes, such as American versus French culture, the battle of the sexes, the survival instinct, the dangers of repression and the resultant outbreak of the Id, and yet is able to sustain a lighthearted, surreal sense of humor throughout it all.I believe that the reason this film was not so well-received was because Being John Malkovich was so well-received, that expectations were exceedingly high for Kaufman's follow up film, Human Nature. When Human Nature turned out to be a vastly different film from Being John Malkovich, the critics predictably were not satisfied with the film.Michel Gondry, the director of Human Nature, is a true original, and all of his subsequent films, Eternal Sunshine, Dave Chappelle's Block Party, and the Science of Sleep, are also brilliant.But for me, Human Nature is his best film so far, because it is able to balance the drama and the comedy without one overwhelming the other, as in Eternal Sunshine.
Charlie Kaufman can't write third acts
posted on 28 May 2009Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman received a great deal of acclaim for his "Being John Malkovich" script, but while that film contained many quirky and inventive ideas, the plot fell apart in the third act, making for an ultimately unsatisfying experience. The same can be said for his second produced script, "Human Nature," which is chock-full of good ideas but ultimately unravels. Kaufman is clever and a jokester, he's just not much of a scenarist.On the up side, there's a lovely performance by Patricia Arquette, who's not afraid of any of the many bizarre turns her character goes through, and director Michel Gondry (who has made terrific videos for Bjork and others) does the best that he can with the script. (Although those CG mice are pretty lame once they are set free.)Not an unalloyed success, but some elements here definitely work. Too bad they don't all come through.
Oh Come On, this one is great
posted on 10 May 2009I don't know what's happening with the votes on this movie. It IS really great. May be people just get offended by lots of nudity in this picture? Why to bother? It's VERY thought-provoking, extremely smart, funny and in a same way sad. I prefer it over Eternal Sunshine sometimes. Really great story about how hopeless we all are. A bit farce, a bit comedy, and great philosophical meaning. Why don't we live in forests? Why don't we try to be free? Why do we live in this world of steel and plastic? Just think about what questions do Kaufman movie rise. Being John Malkovich .. is pretty shallow, not strong work. I still adore it, but it's worst Kaufmans work for me, though it's extremely original. Adaptation brings out greatest thoughts about movie-making, about human relations, about creativity and Hollywood, about mainstream and real art. And the funny thing Adaptation even mocks about itself. Great script.Eternal Sunshine is mainly about love, destiny and memories. Nothing else there. Though i have to admit it's a perfect script. Human Nature is an anti-human, Greenpeace-pro movie... till the very end. It mocks humanity sometimes, but mostly talks about how self-important we are, how ungracious to the nature around us. But the end ... Well, wont write spoilers here.This movie is a skeptical answer for all those hopeless romantics out there. And i think it's a great symbiotic relationship. Romance and skepticism.
See it for Rhys Ifans
posted on 08 May 2009In terms of release dates, Human Nature (2001) has got to be one of the weirdest movies I've encountered: It premiered in Cannes 2001, but is getting released only now (May 2002) in the states (limited release) and Europe, in a painfully slow manner - See Release Dates.Nice movie about the human nature, as its title suggests. It presents some interesting aspects about the human society and the rules we make. Although I expected it to be a little more "deep" and present some more fundamental and philosophical ideas, it's very enjoyable and extremely funny at times.The 4 leading actors are great, especially Rhys Ifans and Patricia Arquette (how brave!); Who knew she's got such a lovely singing voice, too?This is Michel Gondry's first feature. Gondry is a French video-clips director, known for his excellent work on such music videos as Massive Attack's "Protection"; Chemical Brothers' "Let forever be"; Foo Fighters' "Everlong"; Daft Punk's "Around the World"; and Bjork's "Joga", "Bachelorette", "Hyperballad", "Isobel", "Army of me" and "Human Behaviour".6.5/10
not Kaufman's finest, but still enjoyable at times
posted on 26 Apr 2009SPOILERS To a lot of film fans, Charlie Kaufman is a bit of a cult legend. Creating often surreal works of genius, Kaufman is recognised for such greats as "Being John Malkovich" and "Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind". One of his works which often passes over the grid however is 2001's "Human Nature". Written after Malkovich but before "Adaptation" it is another obscure film from the writer, which is enjoyable but never quite shines to it's fullest potential.Born with a rare genetic defect, Lila Jute (Patricia Arquette) begins to develop body hair when she is in her teens. Now in her early 30s, Lila has returned from a number of years in the wilderness looking for love. Dating Doctor Nathan Bronfman (Tim Robbins), a man with an equally complex past, things seem to be going well. That is, until the introduction of the mysterious ape man Puff (Rhys Ifans) and the seductive Gabrielle (Miranda Otto).Often working with either Michael Gondry or Spike Jonze (Gondry being the director of "Human Nature"), Charlie Kaufman has a remarkable record of writing high standard films. Often suffering from an inability to conclude stories ("Adaptation" and "Malkovich" falling flat towards the end), Kaufman's true skill comes in writing stories that are not only obscure, but so extremely surreal that you feel intelligent for just making the effort to watch the film.In "Human Nature" something feels like it has gone wrong however. Whilst so many of Kaufman's films are addictive and keep you focused until the often anti-climatic finale, "Human Nature" has a tendency to drag. Whether this is down to the script or some annoying performances by Tim Robbins and Rhys Ifans (Ifans' accent in particular grates), it's difficult to say, but the one definite fact is that this film is just not Kaufman's finest.It would be unfair to simply slate "Human Nature" without addressing some of it's qualities. With great performances by Arquette and Otto, the film is not completely lacking in acting talent. These two women give life to their characters brilliantly, and whilst Robbins and Ifans might put in surprisingly weak performances, the film is saved to a degree by the two female leads.As well as the female dominance, the film's script does in fact have some really brilliant moments. With a few memorable scenes, it does have the potential to make it's audience laugh. Sadly for Kaufman though, these glorious times are far too rare and the story slips gently into a non-entity.It's hard to imagine anyone who could hate Charlie Kaufman. Writing some truly amazing films, Kaufman stands to accept awards with a look of awkwardness and embarrassment. If anything, the man remains as interesting a figure, as those that he creates. Still, with "Human Nature", he reminds us that he is far from the perfect author. Often creating magnetic films which have weak endings, it feels strange to watch a film which never really takes off. "Human Nature" DOES have it's moments of glory, but for a Kaufman film, they are far too rare and as a result, the film slips into obscurity. If you want to watch Kaufman, your better off sticking to some of his other works.
Extremely funny
posted on 11 Mar 2009This is an extremely funny movie, not only about culture versus nature, but also about over romantic views about "nature" as some ideal condition for human beings. I think the movie is like looking at the ongoing debates on sexism and biologism etc, in the distorting mirror. Michel Gondry has previously touched upon these matters in his brilliant music videos with Björk. But I guess, if you never have thought about these things, you might not be able to appreciate the quite intelligent irony in this movie.
okay movie....hot actress
posted on 03 Feb 2009okay .....human nature was bizarre to say the least.....the humor was..well different....but i liked it mainly because of it's theme about human nature and how we can fight our nature,...but its a battle were bound to lose....also a hirsute patricia arquet was still sexy..not a great movie, but for a bizzare nights entertainment check it out.
My favorite Kaufman movie
posted on 01 Feb 2009As much as I love his other movies (except for Confessions..., I didn't find too much original material in that one), I think Human Nature is the one I love re-watching most. Beside the very original (hey, this is Kaufman we are talking about!) main story line there are some incredibly funny side branches and the movie full of quotable one-liners.Tim Robbins and Patricia Arquette do a great job, as I learned to expect from them.The movie might have drawn some critical fire because it is very weird. The IMDb ratings show the same thing... But if you like weird (or one of the stars), rent it, and I promise you won't be disappointed.
Something is very wrong here...
posted on 08 Jan 2009I don't know. I probably wasn't in the right mood for this one. They claim it's a comedy. I never smiled. They tried to deal with serious issues. I thought it all rather stupid. They made a 96 minutes film. I couldn't get past the first 30. Not for everyone. Definitely not for me.
Kaufman at his best
posted on 20 Sep 2008If I were to sum up Human Nature in three words, I would say: screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malckovich). Three other words? Direcctor Michelle Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind).Give these two a powerful cast with Patricia Arquette, Tim Robbins and Miranda Otto and you've got yourself a winner. Alas, the real star of the film is Rhys Ifans, who plays the bizarre Puff, a modern-day Tarzan who discovers the human race after decades of wild life. This weird and ironic tale also includes a lonely wolf woman, highly intelligent mice and a man pondering about his life right after his death. Trust me, it doesn't get any better than this.
A bizarre comedy from the warped mind of Charlie Kaufman
posted on 17 Aug 2008The latest movie from the warped mind of Being John Malkovich writer Charlie Kaufman is a romantic comedy, exploring the relationships between four individuals brought together by a series of tentative bonds.The first character, introduced in a series of flashbacks, is Lila (Patricia Arquette), a hirsute girl who becomes an outcast from society due to her fur-covered body. She decides to live in the forest and become a nature writer, but eventually, she gets horny, so her electrolysist (played by Rosie Perez) sets her up with Dr. Nathan Bronfman, an anal and neurotic psychologist, played by Tim Robbins. Bronfman has his own set of issues after being raised by strict disciplinarian parents, and it's not surprising that he's a 35-year-old virgin, considering that his main area of study is trying to teach lab mice table manners. The two quickly fall in love and on a nature trip, they come across a man who has been raised in the wilds, not by a monkey, but by his human father who thinks that he is a monkey. This monkey man, played by Rhys Ifans, brings out Lila's more animalistic urges, but Nathan thinks that this is the key for taking his research to the next step. The newly dubbed "Puff" allows himself to be conditioned by Nathan, trying to please his newfound "father", by learning and acting more human.Relative newcomer, Miranda Otto, plays Gabrielle, Nathan's manipulative "French" lab assistant, playing with the doctor's feelings to get whatever she wants from him. When Nathan finds out Lila's hairy secret, it horrifies him, driving him into Gabrielle's arms and creating a bizarre love rectangle between the four.Kaufman once again gets a chance to see how far he can go with a number of strange premises and try to tie them together into a cohesive story. This time around, he is working with another video director making his first feature length film in Michel Gandry.Frankly, Human Nature only has one or two jokes-neither as original as a portal into the head of John Malkovich-but they're funny enough to be stretched out and provide humorous fodder for the entire movie. It does take a little while to warm up to these characters and the situation though. Early in the movie, when a naked and hairy Lila starts parading through the forest singing a song that could have come right out of Disney's "Song of the South", you expect a very long and painful movie. But it gets better, and clearly, Rhys Ifans steals the movie, much like he did as Hugh Grant's roommate in Notting Hill. Some of the funnier scenes involve Puff's "training" to be more human, and the set-up just gets more and more outlandish. At one point, he is taught how to behave at the opera with a full opera box set constructed inside his cage. Imagine Gene Wilder and Peter Boyle singing "Puttin' on the Ritz" in Young Frankenstein to get some idea how funny this situation becomes as it progresses. Ifans alternates between being highly cultured and refined and being a horny, sex-crazed animal. This leads to all sorts of insane situations, where he tries but fails to control his urges, at one point humping a waitress in a classy restaurant. Eventually, he goes on a lecture tour, and the animalistic lovemaking of Nathan and Gabrielle in the next room, drives Puff to a lecherous life seeking out prostitutes. This allows Ifans to show off a darker side to the character, and he beautifully captures the pain suffered by a man-animal that can't decide which he would rather be. The characters are similar archetypes to those found in Being John Malkovich, as Tim Robbins plays John Cusack's hapless schmuck, Otto plays the Catherine Keener bitchy other woman role, and Arquette is the frumpy, spurned woman. Most of the second half of the movie shows how the four characters play a series of human mind games, as they try to feed their animal urges.Tim Robbins plays his character a bit subtler then some of his past roles, but it works for the character. One of the other amusing schticks involves Nathan debunking his own shrink's theories on his problems--surely his chosen field of study couldn't have anything to do with his strict upbringing. His reaction to finding out that his parents have adopted a polite and well-mannered six-year-old is priceless.It's fairly obvious that Otto is one of Australia's latest Nicole Kidman clones, as she has a similar mix of beauty and range of demeanor, being sweet one moment and sassy the next. While Gabrielle is a fairly minor role compared to the others, her next appearance will be in the second chapter of The Lord of the Rings.Patricia Arquette is the weakest link in this equation. (Or is she the missing link?) She spends much of the movie naked or semi-clothed, but doing everything possible to be as unattractive and as unsexy as possible. If she isn't covered in hair from literally from head to toe, she is shaving her body hair, or she is bald, wearing a bad wig and acting psychotic. The concept of a hair-covered woman is a creep enough concept without Arquette's over-the-top performance.The movie isn't as stylish as some of director Michel Gandry's videos, although the forest scenes hark back to one of his earliest works, which irony of ironies, was on Bjork's first video for the song, "Human Behavior".Overall, Human Nature is a bizarre little movie that gets funnier as it goes along. The laughs come slow at first, but once Rhys Ifans takes center stage, the laughs are regular and hearty. It is a terrific exploration of what it is to be human and what it is to be an animal, and how hard it sometimes is to make the two ends meet. That said, if you're expecting this to be exactly like Being John Malkovich, then you may be disappointed, as this is an animal of another species.Rating: 7 out of 10
Weird movie, Kaufman style, but not so good as others
posted on 07 Aug 2008This is a movie full of symbolism and satire. A movie called "Human Nature" starts and ends with two little white rats, for example. We are examining 3 characters: a woman that looks like a monkey, a man that is raised as a monkey and a man that was raised as a man (table manners and everything) by his parents. All hell breaks loose when they interact due to their human nature.I have seen "Adaptation" and "Being John Malkovich" and enjoyed them tremendously, but this movie failed to capture my mind and heart. Maybe it was the ridiculous hearings that the three characters were subjected to, or maybe it's because I have a great respect for Tim Robbins and my expectations were very high.It is harder and harder to grade movies. I will grade them by the degree of satisfaction at the end of each. This one gets a 6 and while there are movies that I graded higher and are not better, I cannot in good conscience raise the mark.
Hollywood's inhumanity to audiences
posted on 31 May 2008When I was passed a test screening ticket for "Human Nature" by a furtive young man in a painfully unfashionable anorak in a slightly disreputable part of London, I could be forgiven for thinking I was being invited to the screening of a film of immoral virtue. When I finally stumbled into the night after watching it, I wished it had been pornography I had been watching, not the absolute insult to celluloid manufacturers everywhere that is "Human Nature". To say I was disappointed is the biggest understatement since the pilot of the Hindenberg told reporters he'd never quite got the hang of landing. The film stars Tim Robbins, Patricia Arquette, Rhys Ifans, and Miranda Otto and I think I could have been forgiven for thinking that this cast alone gave the film more potential than "Cannonball Run II" and I was actually looking forward to seeing it. Tim Robbins can act the pants of most other actors around; Patricia Arquette is an adequate actress and can be convincing when she needs to be; Miranda Otto is riding the new wave of Antipodean talent in Hollywood; and although Rhys Ifans will be in any film, anywhere, any time for the price of a biscuit and a cup of tea, he is a talented comic performer. So what went wrong? Well, the easier question to answer would be what went right? The answer is nothing went right - the film is a complete mess of unexplored themes and unfinished thoughts giving it what feels to the viewer like an identity crisis. Just what is this film trying to be? It tells the story of several people with challenges (not least the director Michel Gondry who had the unenviable task of filming this dross, but I digress). Robbins plays a behavioural scientist (with a small penis and a confidence problem) named Nathan Bronfman, Arquette plays a writer with a hormone problem which makes her grow hair allover her body named Lila, and Ifans is a man brought up in the woods as an ape. Bronfman and Lila discover the apeboy while hiking, and decide to use him to further their experiments in behavioural science. They will turn this wild, untamed man into a pillar of modern society - a startlingly original concept (see "California Man", "Tarzan in New York", George of the Jungle", and countless other movies). The story jumps around flashing forward and backward, even utilising a dead person as a narrator (has that EVER worked in a film?) as it tries to flesh out the story of human nature and how it is repressed or exploited by the modern world. At least that is what I think it is about - the film never decides what it wants to say, do or be. It tries for undergraduate "gross out" humour, as well as attempting deep moments of pathos, and also even chances some drama. Usually when a film tries to be several things at once, you get the impression if it had chosen one identity, it would have been better for it - the thing is, with this film, I don't think it would have succeeded on any of the levels it attempts to visit. "Human Nature" looks like it got halfway through production as a serious movie before someone seeing the rushes announced it wasn't working and that they were going to have to play it for laughs. The result is a film which has a scene of intended dramatic pathos where Arquette, in a hysterical fit of self loathing shaves herself of all of her hair, cutting herself bloody in the process, right next to a scene of Ifans humping the leg of a waitress in a trendy New York restaurant.Not dramatic, and not funny. The film stumbles along for 90 minutes and then falls over itself in rushing to an ending, mirroring the chaos in the aisles as the audience rushed for the exit. It is astounding to note that the writer (Charlie Kaufman) and producer (Spike Jonze) of this drivel are the men who gave the world "Being John Malkovich". If the creators of something so original, so inventive, and so good can turn around and deliver this piece of shambolic nonsense next time around, what hope is there for human nature? To err is human, to force this rubbish upon your fellow humans is unforgivable.
Tim Robbins best movie in years
posted on 21 May 2008A movie about Lila (Patricia Arquette), a young woman with exessive body hair, who decides to live her life in the wild. Lila writes many succesfull books and enjoys her life as one with nature very much, but the longing for love makes her go back to the civilisation. There she tries to fit in by getting rid of all her hair and going out with a man, Dr Nathan (Tim Robbins). He is trying to teach table manners to mice, and even though this seems unatural and wrong to Lila, she countinues to date him.During a walk in the woods the cuople discover an ape man, who has been living totally cut of from civilsation. Nathan decides to teach the ape man manners, which Lila finds horrible but she doesn't say anything about it. Dr Nathan and his french assistant Gabrielle names the ape man Puff, after Gabrielle's puppy dog she had as a child. Soon sparks fly, and Nathan and Gabrielle start an affair...This movie is definatly worth seing at least once (if not twice) 'cause it's so funny and charming. It has some real great jokes, and it's always nice to Tim Robbins in a "cute" part. A great script, great actors and yet it wasn't such a big success. I blame the PR!
Kaufman Scores Again!
posted on 13 May 2008A black comedy about what motivates people to fall in love in our culture. Kaufman's writing is original and very funny. This is not as good as Being John Malkovich or Adaptation but that in no way takes away from Human Nature. I thoroughly enjoyed all the characters.
I liked it
posted on 19 Apr 2008I liked this movie quite a bit. It had many funny moments and provided for a look at society and our attempts to so on and so forth. It sort of reminded me of "Flowers For Algernon." Similar theme, but FFA is about a retard who has smart surgery. It reminded me of something else, too, something that I can't remember. If you can remember good for you.
Multiple misunderstoods
posted on 18 Mar 2008The screenwriter Charlie Kaufman--the only non-director screenwriter to be crowned an auteur in...ever, maybe?--has been rather unfortunately compared to the likes of Monty Python and Tom Stoppard. Higher-falutin folk, the kinsmen of Pauline Kael, have likened him this time out to John Guare, Christopher Durang and David O. Russell--an unsavory and unholy trinity if ever there was one. But Kaufman is much more interesting than that. This nature-versus-nurture farce may have plot construction that reminds middlebrows of their favorite Broadway smarty-pantses, but in essence the picture is closer to Marco Ferreri's flatulating comedies and Dusan Makavejev's back-to-the-body splatter heroics. Patricia Arquette is cursed by her body: she's hairy as an ape. Piqued at God, she decides to go "back to nature," and live as the apes live. Her human-civilized training won't let her go all the way, and so she becomes a nature writer--a seemingly Rosseauian profession that is also a total unconscious betrayal of her natural "freeness." Horny and unloved, she is set up with Tim Robbins as a control-crazed, scientific Miss Manners who teaches laboratory mice to eat with the right fork. The two of them discover an apish man grunting in the wilds of Echo Park--and soon enough the chase is on, with romantic entanglements and switchoffs that make the parallelogram of partners in BEING JOHN MALKOVICH look antique, Scribean. HUMAN NATURE is not, as some other dopy Kaelian critics have carped, a sixties-style back-to-nature movie. (How did they miss the climactic scene in which Arquette tries to use electric-shock techniques, just like Robbins', to de-civilize the Ape Man and bring him back to Nature?) It does, however, use the metaphor of nature/nurture as a template for all the ways lovers make each other conform; and the way society makes us all chin up and salute. As in his forthcoming ADAPTATION, Kaufman's opinion of the ultimate value of all human endeavor is cheeringly bleak. In HUMAN NATURE, "civilization" is represented by an ape man in a plexiglass cage reading MOBY DICK to the crackle of a fake fireplace; and nature is a fallen place, unreturnable-to, the 21st-century cyber-citizen's joke. All that is "human nature," Kaufman tells us, is the desire to burrow your genitals into someone else's. And Kaufman comes up with a picture of Civilization that's as pungent as any of Stanley Kubrick's similar critiques: the Ape-Man grinding his hips against a sixth-grade slide projector's images of naughty seventies porn--and then receiving a punitive electric shock that sends him hurtling across the room. The director, Michel Gondry, does not do a good job with the material. He was clearly stuck in an impossible bind. If he followed the appropriate path cleared by Spike Jonze in MALKOVICH--rendering Kaufman's whimseys in a dank, cruddy naturalistic, offhand style--he would seem no more than an imitator; instead he did what one feared Jonze would do--he has music-video'd up the script. And so Arquette, singing an Alan Menken-like paean to the unconditional love found in nature, does it against obviously tinny back projection that might work fine in a Bjork video, but here seems cloying, little-kiddish, sub-Wes-Anderson-y. Ditto the performance by that inevitable condescender and cartooner, Tim Robbins: he never plays a role, he lobs spitballs at it. Kaufman's gags, line by line, are not as sharp as they were in MALKOVICH; but the combination of highbrow literary techniques, and extreme abjection and cruelty, is almost identical. Kaufman makes 95% of the Writer's Guild of America look like slothful, bottom-feeding shmoes. Wait till you see ADAPTATION--a clever fellow's flabbergasting home run. In the mean time, please tell a friend that this guy is nothing like Tom Stoppard, or whatever innocently "clever" poetaster he is routinely compared to. This guy means it for real.
Approach With Caution
posted on 01 Feb 2008The biggest question one should ask in regards to this work is: how does stuff like this get made - who finances it? Although boasting an impressive cast and a script by Charlie Kaufmann, the result is a chaotic mess.He may present us with interesting and strangely twisting scripts but somehow Kaufmann's work always leaves me less than fulfilled. Maybe it's because he lets too many thoughts come to the surface and then stray as he buries each under a morass of themes that all peter out long before the end. Work like this mostly comes across as a poor man's Preston Sturges; 'Miracle Of Morgan's Creek' it ain't.Still, there are some moments of interest and it is intriguing to see an actress as attractive as Arquette defile her body image (including a very young Hillary Duff playing Arquette's character in flashback) so thoroughly as she does here. Yet there seems precious little insight or depth of ideology and Gondry's pop-promo directorial style helps matters little.This is certainly a curiosity for fans of Kaufmann's writing but surely even the most die-hard admirer would have to admit to its many failings. Approach with caution.
A very crude, slow and unstructured journey
posted on 27 Nov 2007"Human Nature" is a comedy written by "Being John Malkovich's" Charlie Kaufman and it doesn't fail to carry the distinct aroma of his previous film. The film explores our so-called "primal urges" and our need to live naturally with deep consideration of those urges.Patricia Arquette plays Lila Jute, a human naturist who has a little problem. She is suffering from a hormonal balance that causes her to be abnormally covered with body hair. While this does not pose much of a concern for her personally, it does for everyone else and more specifically, men. After getting fed up with the world, she decided to live in the forest amongst the animals and write best-selling nature books. However the animal in her begins to miss the precious company of men and so she returns to civilization. Lila shaves her body hair and begins a somewhat odd relationship with Nathan Bronfman (Tim Robbins). Nathan happens to be an etiquette scientist who tries to teach mice and Lila table manners. One day, Lila and Nathan come across an untamed man (Rhys Ifans) who was raise by a father who believed himself to be a monkey. That man is later nicknamed Puff. The Puff creature happens to be the perfect subject for Dr. Nathan Bronfman as he changes Puff's wild ways to more more cultivated conduct. Lila is left torn between lying about her "human nature" or embracing her urges and running wild.Perhaps I'm as prude as Tim Robbins's character, however there is no appreciation of the refined gross-out humor in my sight. It appears as though the crude humor found its way into the movie for no reason other than the fact it could. Luckily the film makes up for that in very unique cinematography. The interesting camera angles and settings take away a bit from the numerous unnecessary masturbation jokes and bodily fluid gags. There were many other ways that such a creative team of filmmakers could have coped with them in a more substantial manner and prevented their detraction of the finer aspects of the movie.The finer aspects of the film include the brilliant acting from some of the somewhat less familiar faces in Hollywood. Actress Patricia Arquette creates a character that is believable, originative and daring. She inhibits Lila with great ease and manages to push all the right buttons to make her tick just the right way. Rhys Ifans fills Puff's shoes with more content than expected. While he is able to add much to the film due to his comedic nature, there are a few points in the film where Rhys is able to show even greater depth. Both actors make great counterparts.At times obscene and at others strange, the comedy manages to tackle some more thought-provoking issues, outside of humping. "Human Nature" discusses issues of evolution, the human desire to blend in and what it really is that makes us human. It walks through a somewhat slow and unstructured journey that imprints the difference between civilization, monkeys and mankind.Despite its charms, "Human Nature" is not what it could have been. It does not live up to its potential because the filmmakers decided to make too many hollow & irrelevant stops and too few truly important ones. In the end, "Nature" is daring, well acted, unique, intelligent in spirit and very very crude.Grade: C
Two Words - Totally Under-rated
posted on 26 Aug 2009I saw this movie on TV and was pleasantly pleased. It turned out better than what I had expected. The best thing about the movie is the story. Its all about human nature of sorts, About thing that people do and choices they make given the circumstances.All the actors fit their respective roles. Especially Rhys Ifans as Puff and Patricia Arquette as Lila. But unlike other movies there is never any breakthrough or memorable scene that one might later remember. The whole movie seems to be one single continuous piece but one doesn't realize that until after the movie.I don't think that this movie also fits any particular genre. Even though it is set as a comedy, all the humor is too suttle to be branded as genuine comedy. I don't know what genre it is, all I know I that is good.So, If you wouldn't fancy any particular genre of movies but want to watch a movie that will not make sad, angry or too confused about the plot and so on, Watch this.