dierregi The story goes as follows: a beautiful hirsute blonde, named Lila and played by Arquette, upset by her work experience in a circus' freak show, runs away from society and becomes a famous writer. However, due to sexual urges, she decides to undergo painful (and extremely lengthy) electrolysis on her whole body, to find a sexual partner.During what one can only imagine as extremely tedious and painful epilation sessions, her beautician mentions a screwed-up scientist, who no woman in her right mind could possibly find attractive. For mysterious reasons, Lila is intrigued, met him and falls in love. Unfortunately, electrolysis having not worked its miracles yet, Lila must continue shaving her body regularly. She is keeping her condition a secret and when she moves in with scientist boyfriend Nathan – played by an unbearable Tim Robbins – her secret becomes hard to keep.At this stage, the weird couple runs into a wild ape-man (named Puff) and they decide to take him back to Nathan's lab and train him to behave. It must be noted that the main experiment carried out by Nathan was teaching rats to use the correct fork while eating sitting at a table. Honestly, you cannot make this stuff up…After some idiotic antics involving a slutty lab assistant, Lila gets dumped because her body hair is still not completely gone. So she kidnaps Puff and moves back into the forest, to live naked and happily hereafter with the ape-man.Unfortunately Nathan decides he wants Lila back, despite having moved in with the slutty lab assistant. Tragedy ensues, but honestly who cares? Not a single one of these characters has any lovable (or believable) feature. Starting from the hairy Lila (why would any actress play this part is beyond my understanding), to the sadistic Nathan who wants to teach rats how to use forks, not to mention ape-man Rhys Ifans, afflicted by serious masturbatory problems.The last - but foremost - question I have is the same asked by another reviewer: how does stuff like this get financed? Seriously, who wants to invest in this type of material?

swillsqueal The evolution of a species has much to do with its ability to live in harmony with the Earth. Those plants and animals which don't or can't live in harmony with their environment don't survive.Humans make history. That's one of their adaptive characteristics. Reason evolves out of environments totally dominated by Nature into ones which are symbiotically entwined with Nature. Instinct needs to be tamed a bit by reason in order for humanity to gradually civilize itself--a psychologically repressive venture to be sure, one that spawns many neuroses. But then, as Freud told us in CIVILIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS, repression of instinct, freedom and the id is necessary to keep civilization together. But is the civilization we've got, the best of all possible worlds? Imagine sitting in an office all day, pushing paper at some ultimately, meaningless desk job when you'd really rather be having sex with the secretarial staff. Repress those thoughts and carry-on... or not, as Puff's father did one day when he decided that he'd had enough of this civilization stuff. That was the day, Puff's father decided to jump up onto his desk, screech his way out of work and become an ape--literally to go back to Nature. "Prison break!" "Human Nature" is funny. On the one hand you have a mild mannered scientist named Dr. Nathan Bronfman who is trying to introduce civilized table manners to white mice within a lab setting and on the other you have a father who has kidnapped his young son from the civilized lap of his mother in order to raise him "Wild Child" style, as an ape in the forests of an overly industrialized America. "Human Nature" is funny because of juxtapositions like these. You see, within this industrialized America there is no room for a dwarf with an IQ of 170, who has a Phd to get any work outside of selling his labour time as a side-show freak, 'flying' an airplane costume in a circus ring, complete with a hairy woman who plays King Kong on the Empire State building (that famous last scene where, it wasn't the airplane who killed Kong, 'it was beauty killed the beast'). Hairy, sexy Lila can't earn a living in any other way than by playing King Kong to a side-show dwarf in airplane costume. Looks can be deceiving and the language of deceit is a large part of what civilized behaviour demands. People can't accept Lila as she is and she knows it. Much as the mythical Tarzan and King Kong, Lila's being violates the decorum of civilization itself. So, she decides to drop out of her side-show wage-slavery, much like Puff's dad and so the ape fest goes until ape meets ape-ess; ape meets civilization; ape-ess meets man and jungle; man meets Lila in hairless disguise and dwarf meets Lila's friend, the beautician with the wickedly snappy electrolysis wand. "Human Nature" is not only great comedy, it's a semi-profound speculative discourse on just what human nature is and how some of that nature is changed and some not changed through the history which humans make, write and remember. Thus, "Human Nature" has more to say to us than films with a similar plot outline e.g., "The Mystery of Kasper Hauser". It's also much funnier than your standard sexual farce. Give "Human Nature" a chance. See it and maybe, uncover some of your own basic instincts. Experience the refreshing wisdom of laughing at yourselves. And, hint, it wouldn't hurt to find a copy of the Kinks'sardonic "Apeman" to listen to before you start the movie.

MisterWhiplash Unlike the other works from Charlie Kaufman- Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind- Human Nature doesn't leave the sort of unbelievable cinematic residue that stays for days and week and even years afterward. It's a work that is low-key even as it's insanely zany in spurts and totally tuned into a comedic frequency that only works for the casual viewer sometimes. But even a lesser work from the likes of Michel Gondry and Kaufman registers higher in a way that comedies with lower ambitions couldn't dream to aspire to. It has some conventionality to it, with its love triangle between Dr. Nathan Bronfman (Tim Robbins), Lila (Patricia Arquette), and Gabrielle (Miranda Otto) that ends up tearing apart the characters to question who they are (aside from Gabrielle). Yet that's not really totally at concern, though it probably has somewhere to figure into the whole idea of what makes for truth in human nature. One might argue, after seeing the film, it has something to do with individualism...actually, if we go by Kaufman's interpretation, it has to do with orgasms.Told in quasi-Rashomon style (with the law and the afterlife, as in Rashomon, figuring into Human Nature as well), Bronfman has an interest in teaching mice table manners when we first meet him (one of the film's funniest recurring images/scenes), and gets set up on a date with Lila, who's a writer of nature stories (from personal experience, due to an abnormal hair condition as a child she decides to live in the wild after an unsuccessful stint at a side-show). She decides to conform for him, hiding the fact that she's a hairy "ape" from the wild, as he hides his compulsion for manners and proper behavior. Enter in "Puff" (Rhys Ifans, in one of his funniest roles/performances yet), who gets that name by Gabrielle, Nathan's assistant at work, and an adoptive mother to Nathan being adoptive father. Now it will be time to really go further with Nathan's research- to teach one who's been in the wild always to be a proper, educated human. This proves to be a challenge, as Puff can't resist the urge to hump whenever aroused, and is around the sexual explosion that erupts between Nathan and Gabrielle- the love triangle that unfolds that may spell as foreshadowing for Puff later on in the story...And so on. You might get just the slight sense- scratch that, overwhelming impression- that this is not you're average tale of what it means to be an ape-man and become 'civlized'. It's a whacked-out comedy of manners and sexuality, where one's own soul becomes more of a question then what is really meant to be proper or what not. Actually, there is some interest in how Nathan figures into this as well- he's the least human of all, at least for the most part, as he loses himself in his pursuit of science, with Lila losing hers alongside. So Kaufman does end up working some very interesting characters here, and the situations and little notes that pop up are about as irreverent as he's ever done. The problem is it ends up un-even too: little things are left un-checked, as to Gabrielle possibly not being really French (it's put in as a possible note of her being untruthful as well, but it's never addressed again, or her motives of anything, even as Otto plays the character well enough), or the psychology that emerges from Puff himself. Does he just want to "have some of that" as he says to the committee, or does he get too adjusted to his surroundings.However what holes or problems might lie in the screenplay, there's no denying the bright strengths just in general working in Human Nature. Who would think up such a strange concept, leaping bravely off of Truffaut's Wild Child into a sort of common theme in Kaufman's work so far? Kaufman would, especially as it's part of the need to feel like someone else, or what it must be to try to be something one can't really be through insecurities and troubles in dealing with reality and surroundings. I would imagine that Kaufman had a lot of fun churning this one out, possibly even thinking it might be improbable it might even get made. Luckily, it's directed by Gondry with his mix of fantastical visual energy and a real sense of humility with the absurd material. It doesn't have the same power as in his best work either, but as a first feature film it could've been a lesser endeavor too. Human Nature ends on an (ironically?) unique ending, where Puff does what we'd expect him to do, but then maybe not, and it caps off what has led up to it- a weird little ball of comic-curiosity that should please fans of Robbins (very funny in his awkward doctor character), Arquette, and especially Ifans.

Lee Eisenberg Looking back on it, "Human Nature" sort of reminds me of "I Shot Andy Warhol", the way we slowly but surely get exposed to a gritty (but somewhat funny) topic. In this case, a man (Rhys Ifans) raised in the wild is getting interviewed by a congressional committee about why he murdered a scientist (Tim Robbins). But overall, the movie poses the question of what separates humans from animals. And after everything that the movie shows, you'll probably agree with what Ifans's character says about everything. As for Robbins's character's setting, it definitely looks like something that would please Jean-Paul Sartre. This movie's probably not for everyone, but I think that it's worth seeing. Also starring Patricia Arquette, Hilary Duff, Peter Dinklage, Mary Kay Place and Robert Forster.Yeah, words are kinda evil...