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Arquette

Grady

Human Nature is a quirky niche-audience comedy from the mind of Charlie Kaufman, the same pleasantly disturbed man who wrote Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, and Adaptation. He is currently working on a possible remake of Slaughterhouse-Five.

In a sense, the plot consistes of a traditional love quadrangle, like those French roundelay farces where A loves B, B loves C, C loves D, and D loves A. In this case however, the four main characters are rather unusual.

• Patricia Arquette plays a writer/researcher who has an extreme personal grooming issue: her body is covered with hair, like an ape's. For years she lived in nature, away from humans, but has returned briefly to human company because she needs a mate.
• Tim Robbins plays a scientist who was raised by crazy parents who were obsessed with manners and discipline. The effects are seen in his own work, which mainly involves teaching proper table manners to mice.
• Rhys Ifans, that Welsh comedic genius, plays a man who was raised in the wilderness, thinking he was an ape.
• Miranda Otto is Robbins's assistant, who pretends to be French for no apparent reason.

The characters come together in various romantic permutations after Robbins comes upon the feral Ifans, and decides to teach him how to act like a polite human being. Robbins figures if he can teach mice to eat with salad forks, it should be a simple matter to teach a real human to be polite. Ifans does quite well, managing to master philosophy and opera overnight. He becomes completely civilized, except for the fact that he can't overcome his ape background in sexual matters. The site of buttocks drives him crazy with lust, causing him to act like a horny dog, humping every bum he sees. Robbins places a shock collar on Ifans to control him in such cases, and the experiment continues until his ultimate test - lunch at Hooters.

The very epitome of "offbeat" comedy.

I didn't laugh much, but I didn't laugh that much at Being John Malkovich either, although I enjoyed both movies. I just enjoy the sheer audacity of the concepts. Kaufman's scripts use lowbrow humor, like slapstick and pratfalls, to make highbrow points. I don't know if there has ever been a film with more falling down and tripping, yet beneath the frivolity is a serious examination of how we are each shaped by our environment, unaware of the extent to which we are an extension of our parents and teachers and the conventions of our society. As the film portrays vividly, our lives are basically a struggle between what we want to do (hump the beautiful buttocks when our waitress bends over) and what we have been taught to do (avert our eyes politely).

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