LosAngelesTimes
Titles like Human Nature--or Happiness or Pleasantville or even Parenthood--are more or less guilty pleas in advance that what you're going to get is Irony with a capital I, the name being merely a mask for the unfettered, unadorned Truth that will be revealed once the credits start to roll. It isn't exactly false advertising--we're in on the joke from the start; we know about the malignant story behind the benign title. What might be bogus is the claim that these movies are comedies.
Human Nature is not exactly Being John Malkovich, the previous film scripted by Charlie Kaufman and one whose concept was so delightfully farfetched you hardly noticed there was so little going on. Human Nature offers no such distractions. The point that humans are, by their very nature, fonts of self-interest has been a basic tenet of law, history and art since law, history and art began. And, in most cases, has been a lot funnier than Human Nature.
One line contains the sum of the movie's message. It is spoken by research scientist Nathan Bronfman (Tim Robbins), who is trying to facilitate the assimilation of ape man Puff (Rhys Ifans) into the modern world: "When in doubt, don't ever do what you really want to do." It's funny, it's biting, it's wise. And it's a nugget of wisdom we hardly needed Human Nature to impart.
Human Nature is a goofball movie, in the way Malkovich was, but it tries too hard. Director Michel Gondry, a well-respected commercial director (most celebrated for several Levi's ads), seems convinced that Kaufman is onto something, but his own directorial choices are far more amusing than Kaufman's script. Having the follicularly challenged Lila Jute (Patricia Arquette) photographed in the faux-antique Kodachrome colors of an old Disney documentary while crooning about the glories of being a hairy nature girl certainly makes the scene. The iris-y flashbacks to Nathan's childhood, in which his parents (Robert Forster and Mary Kay Place) lecture him about the evils of natural life (Never wallow in the filth of instinct) are funny in and of themselves.
But Human Nature is a rather sophomoric exercise in cynicism written by a very successful writer of screenplays. How capital I-ronic is that?
John Anderson
Los Angeles Times
Copyright 2002 Los Angeles Times