Arquette's at heart of hairy take on 'Human Nature'
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A lovely young woman named Lila (Patricia Arquette), whose body is covered with hair, wafts through a storybook-green forest, singing a touching song in which "diabolical" neatly rhymes with "follicle." "Look at all the hair, everywhere," she trills, embracing her inner hirsuteness. Elsewhere, behavioral scientist Nathan (Tim Robbins) struggles to teach table manners to rodents in his lab, complete with teeny-weeny forks and plates.
No, we're definitely not in Kansas anymore, but inside the mind of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman ("Being John Malkovich"). This time, he's playing with questions of nature and nurture, tame vs. untamed, societal convention vs. instinct — and why a French person would pronounce the name "Puff" with two syllables.
Nathan, convinced that civilized behavior — by all species — is the answer to the world's problems, soon gets a chance to try out his theories on an actual human: namely, a feral young man (Rhys Ifans), captured on a hike and christened "Puff" by Nathan's oozily French assistant (Miranda Otto). Puff soon finds himself in a cage at Nathan's lab, forced to listen to taped approximations of civilized speech. ("I don't watch a lot of television." "You're looking lovely this evening." "My inseam is 36 inches.")
Soon, he's sporting a smoking jacket, tasting wine, reading Yeats, and enacting Peter Pan. Civilized behavior, it turns out, is easily taught. "When in doubt," cautions Nathan, "don't do what you really want to do." Lila, likewise, transforms herself: Determined to find love, she undergoes full-body electrolysis; its little zapping needles similar to the electric shocks Puff gets from the behavior-modification collar he must wear.
All this, however, is told in flashbacks, as Lila, Puff and Nathan recount the tale from a prison cell, a hearing room and a mysterious white chamber, respectively. As the full story gradually emerges, "Human Nature" becomes slightly less comedic and more wistful. As in "Being John Malkovich," this film's main characters are unhappy misfits, struggling to find a way to fit in.
Michel Gondry, a French commercials/video director making his feature debut here, embraces the material, giving us "mouse-eye-view" cameras and rusty-looking home-movie footage of the characters' younger days. While his touch isn't always sure — some of the scenes, particularly those involving electroshock therapy, seem too dark and too long for the rest of the movie — he understands that the wildly inventive screenplay is the star.
And he's fortunate in his cast: The ghostly pale Robbins is tightly nebbishy; Ifans is leeringly weird. Otto, all cheekbones and googly eyes, threatens to steal the movie. But what lingers is Arquette and her wistful little squeak of a voice, imbuing Lila with a mournfulness that's quite touching. Shorn of her hair and hiding behind wigs and sweater sets, she's the heart of what may be the year's saddest funny movie.
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