Human Nature
(2001) dir. Michel Gondry
viewed: 12/18/02
Human Nature is a high-concept comedy with some intellectual trappings. It is also broad comedy with a significant reliance on slap-stick and physical humor. Its split-personality approach seems analagous to its themes about the conflict between animal instinct and civilization and its codes.
Written by Charlie Kaufman of Being John Malkovich (1999) and soon-to-be-released Adaptation (2002) fame, the film mines a territory akin to his other work, absurdity and surrealism, virtually untrafficked by other Hollywood films. The film is director Michel Gondry’s first feature film, and maybe the film’s short-comings all crop up in its execution. Or maybe the material just simply isn’t as funny as it is supposed to be. I hardly laughed at all during it, though I found it moderately amusing throughout.
Trying to paraphrase the general plot of the film makes it sound funnier than it really is. It’s also quite convoluted. Patricia Arquette plays Lila, a woman whose body is covered in fur, escapes civilization to live in the wild. Longing for love, she returns to civilization and meets Tim Robbins, who plays a scientist who abhors nature and is obsessed with “civilizing” humanity. His life’s work is training mice to use proper table etiquite. And Rhys Ifans is a wild man who was raised in the woods, isolated from civilization, thinking himself an ape.
The film’s major subtext is foregrounded, obviously, in the conflict in humanity between the natural world and the “civilized” one. Kaufman and Gondry clearly sympathize with the nature side on the surface, Robbins’ scientist is so repressed and out of touch with himself that he can’t interpret his explicitly straightforward dreams in which his conflicts are played out. Each character is narrates the events in flashback form, with varying degrees of understanding. Robbins again is clearly myopic regarding the facts.
However, there is an aspect of self-loathing in many of the characters and perhaps also in the tone of the film. The film often seems loaded with intentional irony. Do the film-makers truly side with Arquette and Ifans’ characters? If so, much of the film’s rhetoric is also straight-forward and explicit.
Ultimately, I didn’t think that the film was very good. I can’t really say what it was exactly. I think it was just the whole thing. I don’t know. Je ne sais quoi.
