Themes: Fish Out of Water, Looking For Love, Pygmalion Stories
Main Cast: Tim Robbins, Patricia Arquette, Rhys Ifans, Miranda Otto, Robert Forster
Release Year: 2001
Country: US/FR
Run Time: 96 minutes
MPAA Rating: R
Plot
Video director Michel Gondry and scriptwriter Charles Kaufman -- who shot to fame after penning Being John Malkovich -- collaborate on this bizarre fable about human behavior in and out of society. The film opens by quickly introducing the three leads -- Lila (Patricia Arquette) who is locked away in prison; Puff (Rhys Ifans) who is testifying before Congress; and Nathan Bronfman (Tim Robbins) who is sitting in a glowing white afterlife waiting room with a bullet hole in his head. Rewinding to the beginning of the story, the film shows Lila as a girl about to enter womanhood. Unfortunately, puberty goes horribly awry and she starts to grow thick hair all over her body. After performing as Queen Kong in a circus freak show, she chucks it all and goes to live in the forest, where she becomes the best-selling author of a misanthropic hard-line ecological tome. At age 30, her itch for male companionship becomes overwhelming and she ventures back into the city. She is helped by electrolysis guru Louise (Rosie Perez), who not only makes Lila presentable to society, but introduces her to Nathan, a 35-year-old virgin who, as a scientist, has devoted his life to teaching table etiquette to lab mice. While showing Nathan the joys of the wild outdoors, Lila and her new beau discover an extremely hirsute feral man whom they dub Puff. Placing him a cage in his lab, Nathan sets out to teach Puff the ways of polite society while dreaming of fame and fortune. The first task is to curb Puff's enormous sexual appetite -- any time he catches sight of a female, Puff either tries to hump her or masturbates vigorously. Nathan yokes him with an electric collar that shocks him any time he acts unseemly. Unfortunately, the humans on the other side of the cage can't quite control their libidos either: Nathan succumbs to the incessant double entendres of his saucy French assistant Gabrielle (Miranda Otto) while Lila finds an animalistic lust for Nathan's science experiment. This film was screened at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival. ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide
Review
Human Nature, screenwriter Charlie Kaufman's follow-up to Being John Malkovich, doesn't match the earth-shattering mix of originality, hilarity, and insight of his debut film, but it comes closer than most movies. It's an hour-and-a-half of solid entertainment. Kaufman shows signs of a unique genius that could only have developed during countless hours spent watching television. Visually inventive French music video and commercial director Michel Gondry makes his feature debut with Human Nature. Unlike Spike Jonze, who directed Malkovich, and was one of the producers here, Gondry sometimes struggles to find the right tone. The palette occasionally seems too bright and cheery, and some of the characters too oblivious to the absurdity of their situations. The cast is mostly terrific, however, especially Australian actor Miranda Otto as Gabrielle, the enigmatic lab assistant with the French accent, and Rhys Ifans as Puff, whose father was a madman who dropped out of society after JFK's assassination, and raised Puff as an ape. Ifans may not have deserved all the attention he got for his relatively simple goofball role in Notting Hill. But here, he sinks his comedic chops into what is basically the role of a lifetime. Like much in the film, Puff is simultaneously ludicrous and charming, and there aren't many actors who could play the character with such physical and verbal grace. The film alternates self-conscious dopiness, as in Puff's impassioned testimony before Congress, with an almost lyrical absurdity, as in Lila's (Patricia Arquette) sudden burst into song. Meanwhile, Human Nature raises thought-provoking points about the lengths people go to in order to be accepted. It also manages to generate a great deal of sympathy for its weird, misbehaving characters, much as Being John Malkovich did, and that in itself is quite an accomplishment. ~ Josh Ralske, All Movie Guide
A philosophical burlesque, Human Nature follows the ups and downs of an obsessive scientist, a female naturalist, and the man they discover who was raised in the wild as an ape. As scientist Nathan trains the wild man Puff in the ways of the world (starting with table manners), Nathan's lover Lila 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.
Plot Summary
Most of the movie is told as flashback: Puff (Rhys Ifans) testifies to Congress, Lila Jute (Patricia Arquette) tells her story to the police, while a dead Nathan Bronfman (Tim Robbins) addresses an unseen audience in the netherworld.
Lila is a woman with a rare hormonal imbalance which causes thick hair to grow all over her body. During her 20's, Lila decides to leave society and live within nature where she feels free to exist comfortably in her natural state. She writes a book called "Fuck Humanity" (formerly "Wind in My Hair") about her naked, savage, happy, and free life in the woods embracing nature. Then, at age 30, strong sexual desire causes her to return to civilization and have her hair removed in order to find a partner.
The partner she finds is Dr. Nathan Bronfman, a psychologist researching the possibility of teaching table manners to mice. Lila and Nathan go hiking in the woods one day. Lila sights a naked man in the woods who has believed himself to be an ape his entire life. Lila discards her clothes and chases him until he's cornered on a tree branch. The man falls off the branch and fall unconscious as Nathan comes along. Nathan brings this man to his lab where the man is named Puff. This name is after his French research assistant, Gabrielle's (Miranda Otto) childhood dog. We discover later from her phone call to an unknown person that she is actually an Australian with a fake French accent. No one else ever hears it and it is never referred to again. First with the help of Gabrielle and later with Lila’s help, Nathan performs extensive manner training on Puff. Eventually Lila decides to take Puff back into the forest to undo his manner training and return him to his natural state.
Lila and Puff live naked in the woods together until Nathan finds them one day and Puff kills Nathan. Lila turns herself in as the murderer and asks Puff to testify on the waywardness of humanity before he returns to his home in the forest.
Some days later, Puff comes back out of the forest and gets into a car with Gabrielle, they both drive off to get food. (She still speaks with a French accent).
Visual style
Several shots in Human Nature recreate scenes from the Björk music video "Human Behaviour" (1993), also directed by Michel Gondry.
Cultural references
The film's structure closely follows the 1921 story A Report To An Academy, by the author Franz Kafka, in which an ape addresses a scientific audience, explaining the difficulties he encountered while becoming a man.
Production
Steven Soderbergh was first interested in directing Charlie Kaufman's script back in late 1996, when Kaufman was still trying to get Being John Malkovich produced. Soderbergh's considerations for casting were for David Hyde Pierce in the role of Nathan Bronfman, Chris Kattan in the role of Puff (likely due to his character Mr. Peepers on Saturday Night Live at the time), and Marisa Tomei in the role of Lila Jute. He was about to go into pre-production when he was offered Out of Sight and after much deliberation he left the project.
Though not as big a success as Gondry and Kaufman's next collaboration, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Roger Ebert, in a three-star review, lauded the film's "screwball charm".[1]
