Strange animal

>> Human Nature is a pleasantly weird movie

by MATTHEW HAYS

Expectations can ruin a film like Human Nature. It is, after all, the screenwriting followup to Charlie Kaufman’s first screenplay for Being John Malkovich. That was a delightfully nutty and screwy film, one that had its characters battling it out for time to spend within Malkovich’s head.

And with his latest, Human Nature, Kaufman doesn’t disappoint—an impressive task. The film is told entirely in flashback, from the perspectives of our three heroes. Patricia Arquette is a woman who was stricken with abizarre malady during puberty that has left her with hair all over her body. Trapped in her animal-like body, she writes bestselling books to support herself and lives away from human contact in the woods. Tim Robbins is an anal scientist who hasn’t recovered from a brutally uptight childhood (at the hands of parents played by Robert Forster and Mary Kay Place); his most recent “experiment” involves training lab mice to use the correct fork for eating a salad. And Rhys Ifans plays a wild-childesque man who was brought up in the wilderness as an ape by a man who thought he was an ape. (It’s every bit as strange—and funny—as it sounds.)

True to Kaufman’s oddball, genre-defying writing style, Human Nature is at once a comedy, drama, social commentary, romance and even a musical. (At one point, Arquette breaks out into song, in a beautiful number about her being one with nature. I wish there’d been one or two more like this.)

Spike Jonze, who directed Malkovich, produces here, with French music video director Michel Gondry directing a feature for the first time. But Kaufman’s unique universe has, thankfully, been kept intact. Part of the charm of the film comes with the use of rear projection and double exposure—devices probably seen as decidedly old fashioned in a CGI-soaked movie world. Kudos to Gondry for choosing this way of illustrating Human Nature. The technique gives the film a look that’s priceless.

With Nature, Kaufman continues his shredding of the moviemaking rule book. The results add up to another welcome respite from big-screen normalcy. :

Human Nature opens Friday, April 26