Human Nature
dir. Michel Gondry
Fine Line Features

The most interesting image in Human Nature is a shot of Miranda Otto (or rather, her body double) breastfeeding a baby on a beach. We see this when Tim Robbins' character imagines what would happen if he and Otto's character had a child. There is a close-up of the baby nursing, revealing a visible network of blue veins in the breast. Why would Robbins' character imagine blue veins in the bosom of the girl in his fantasy?

And that's what makes science fiction, magical realism and absurd whimsy (a la Wes Anderson) work: providing lived-in details and shooting them in close-up. No matter how illogical the story, the viewer can imagine this world is at least a psychological representation of someone's life, adding texture to an otherwise prefabricated smoothness.

Human Nature, written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Michel Gondry, will underwhelm those expecting the same level of writing as Kaufman's Being John Malkovich — this film seems four or five drafts away from that one. Similarly, those who know Gondry's music videos for Björk, Radiohead and others will expect his trademark images bouncing off each other, but mostly he just follows Kaufman's script. As a result, there are few lived-in details, and it's hard to connect with the characters or viewpoints of the story.

The film follows a woman with excessive body hair (Patricia Arquette), a doctor obsessed with teaching proper dinner table manners to mice (Robbins) and a man raised as an ape (Rhys Ifans), who is found by the two and taught manners against his will. It opens with Robbins dead and in heaven, Arquette in prison and talking to investigators, and Ifans before a Senate subcommittee, all three simultaneously narrating their story. There are some good lines, and clever juxtapositions (a lot of the jokes are like the "Puttin' on the Ritz" scene in Young Frankenstein), but trying to give purpose to the comedy are continuous half-cheesy references and quotations about wilderness, civilization and which is better. That civilization in this case represents knowing which fork to use first is wonderful, but it's insufficient to carry the film's themes.

Arquette's lonely, ashamedly hairy Lila simply does not elicit compassion the way John Cusack's compulsive puppeteer did in Being John Malkovich. They are variations on the same theme, but in the transition from male to female something (although not chest hair) was lost. Malkovich had a central metaphor to which all sorts of things could stick, and the whole movie operated in an atmosphere of male fear of women; its two types, Catherine Keener and Cameron Diaz, ultimately chose to abandon Cusack altogether. But it seems that movie's two thinnest jokes — the pet psychologist and the chimp's flashback — were the inspiration for this one.

Kaufman's interest in pop psychology is less than it seems. In its absurd way, the film follows Freudian theory pretty closely. For instance, Robbins' interest in table manners comes from the cruel training of his parents. The only real dig at psychological conventions is extremely brief: When a weary psychiatrist explains to Robbins the obvious reason for his obsession, Robbins laughs unconvincingly and says, "It's too pat." But it is too pat, and though Kaufman may joke about such transparent, easily reduced motivations, he clings too strongly to them. It would be nice to see movies where violent tendencies, ugly personalities and repressed fears were the result of characters' environment, or a simple choice on their part, as opposed to the standard stock flashback, no matter how entertainingly presented.

Still, the movie is funny in parts, especially Ifans' acting. We're also treated to a cameo from Peter Dinklage, the little person so memorable from Living in Oblivion, who continues his seeming crusade to inform and parody at the same time, showing up here with a gun talking about achondroplasia.

Nevertheless, Human Nature is just plain incomplete. We hear from other characters that Robbins has a small penis, but we never learn how he feels about it. Arquette goes to the woods to live with nature and begins singing to the animals, who are seen one by one alone on the forest floor in the manner of film musicals, so we are meant to understand her love of the wilderness has a false quality to it … but then it's no wonder that we do not empathize with her character or care when she decides to return to the wilderness at a later date. The movie continually makes fun of its characters and itself, which is fine, but there are no ideas there except simply stated concepts of savagery beneath the decorum of civilization. At the end, one character tells Ifans to appear before a Senate subcommittee, apparently for no other reason than to explain the framing device. That's it.

There is probably a special hell for people who compare an artist's recent work to his previous, but if so, it's already full. Human Nature is interesting, but only that.

— Ben Siler (sorryevil at yahoo dot com)