Newsweek
April 15 issue, 2002
It might not be possible to make a funnier movie about body hair and table manners than “Human Nature.” Those are some tricky subjects, two places your average screenwriter might not dare to go. But the screenwriter in this case is Charlie Kaufman, author of “Being John Malkovich,” a film about a puppeteer who finds a portal into an actor’s brain. Next to that, body hair is a breeze.
Kaufman's hilarious tale, directed by French music-video auteur Michel Gondry, charts the intersecting lives of three very curious characters: Lila (Patricia Arquette), a nature writer with a rare, extreme-body-hair disorder; her husband, Nathan (Tim Robbins), a stuffy behaviorist who teaches etiquette to lab rats, and Puff (Rhys Ifans), a man raised in the wild as a monkey. After finding Puff during a hike, the couple decides to teach him how to be human. For Nathan, “being human” means using the proper fork. Puff, however, learns a different lesson when he spies Nathan having sex with his French assistant (Miranda Otto) rather than his wife, who shaves tip to toe to hide her condition. Being human, it turns out, is all about sex. Or lying about it, anyway.
Gondry’s low-key direction is full of subtle sight gags, like the slow evolution of Puff’s cage from a dirty hovel to a cultivated English den. Kaufman’s new script isn’t as inspired as “Malkovich.” It’s a precious little concoction—the B-plus work of a madcap genius. But that’s more than enough to make every future Charlie Kaufman movie a must-see.
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