Plot Details: This opinion reveals minor details about the movie's plot.

[With the release of the latest Spike Jonze/Charlie Kaufman opus, "Adaptation", just a few days away (yippee!), I thought I'd go back into my archives and rescue an old review I wrote on a little-seen film, also written by Kaufman, called "Human Nature". Hope you enjoy, cause I sure did.]

Coming off the unquestioned success that was "Being John Malkovich", Charlie Kaufman (and Spike Jonze, who produces here) again brings us a comedy that'll have you scratching your head in wonderment, your mouth agape in awe, and your sides splitting with hilarity, even though you're not quite sure if what you're seeing is really all that funny. "Human Nature", like "Being John Malkovich", is a film that's tough to define, tougher to comprehend, but not so tough to enjoy.

It's a film that purports to be about big ideas -- concerning, duh, human nature -- but that really doesn't give much weight to those ideas. I got the feeling that the ideas were just the hanger off which Kaufman and Co. could drape comic set-pieces, gags, and pratfalls. If you look at it as an intellectual exercise, it does not work. But as a loony farce, it's terribly hilarious, in a rather bent sort of way.

Dr. Nathan Bronfman (Tim Robbins), a behavioural scientist with some serious repression issues and a tiny organ, and his girlfriend Lila (Patricia Arquette), a post-electrolysis ape-girl who once lived alone amongst nature, discover a feral man-child named Puff (Rhys Ifans) as they picnic in the woods. They take Puff back to the city, where they attempt to train the savage out of him, in an attempt to reintroduce him to society.

One of my favourite sequences shows the ridiculous tableaus Bronfman and his assistants have assembled inside the laboratory observation cage that serves as Puff's home. At one point, a fake fireplace turns up; later, we see Puff in an opera box seat, dressed in tuxedo, and clapping enthusiastically to the sounds coming out of a portable radio. These are ridiculous moments, for Puff is still in the nascent stages of socialization, still sporting the vestiges of his wild-man beard, and more likely to frolic in a pile of his own feces than understand Schubert.

Director Michel Gondry doesn't mimic the baroque expressiveness that Spike Jonze found in "Being John Malkovich". Instead, he goes for stark cartoonery. Watch as Ifans flies through the air, more than a dozen times throughout the film, after being zapped by an electronic collar. Or the sweet (and subversive) song Lila delivers as an ode to her hyper-hirsuteness (like the "South Park" movie, Kaufman's songs both pay homage to their sentimental genre and mock it mercilessly). Or Robbins, recounting his part of the story, ignorantly repeating the same silly joke over and over until the audience is forced to laugh at him. "Human Nature" makes no attempt at reconstructing reality; instead it focuses all its energies on creating a reality, one that's malleable and morbid, twisted but bright.

Kaufman's script plays more like a series of Saturday Night Live skits than a follow-up to the nineties' most popular existential cult classic. He revels in his one-joke characters, but makes sure that the one-joke is as strong as can be (the central conceit of Ifans' character, that he was raised in the woods by a man who "thought" he was an ape, was enough in itself to draw me to the film). And except for what he gives to Robbins' character (whose speeches, even though they're meant to be ultra-formal, were still often distracting and clumsy), the dialogue is fresh and frequently funny. "Eet izz like 'Sophie's Choice'," says Nathan's assistant, Gabrielle, the sexy and sly Miranda Otto. "Exzept no, eet izz 'Nathan's Choice'." The narrative he's constructed skips and swings all over the place, unburdened by any and all film conventions. It's told from three different perspectives, testimonial style, a technique that doesn't work in the film's early stages, but does as it nears its conclusion. And it gives the audience ample opportunity to get to know the three main characters, independently and as a unit.

Robbins, in the beginning, appears ill at ease playing Dr. Bronfman. In much of the comic work he's turned in over his career, Robbins is fine at playing idiotic idiot-savants ("The Hudsucker Proxy", "Bull Durham"). But he tends to have trouble with quiet solemnity ("The Shawshank Redemption", "Jacob's Ladder") even when it's within the context of a farce like this one. As the movie moves along, though, Robbins takes centre stage -- he is the sun in this particular universe; all the other actors revolve around him -- and he becomes more relaxed. And more funny, even during his straighter moments.

Arquette plays Lila's discomfort and pathos well, and gets her innocence just right. And she's super sexy, even when covered top to toe by hair. In the film's middle third, when her obsessions take over and she's meant to be soulless and creepy and disturbing, you still can't help feeling for her, caught in such a ridiculous predicament (one too delicious to divulge here). And more so in this one than in her other films, Arquette's stalactite teeth appear to be a character unto themselves. Gondry films her erratic mouth in such a way that the audience feels a threat of attack (an odd character point, that).

Ifans, in the film's most showy role, does in fact steals the show. The surprise is that he doesn't do it in an outlandish way. Ifans could have barged around the set, grunting and groaning, and relying on his pasty bare bottom to draw as many laughs as possible. But instead, he has to play sophistico and Cro-Magnon, sometimes all in one scene, and always subtly. He is achingly funny, terribly tragic, cold and manipulative, open and warm-hearted. An egoless actor in a spindly naked Englishman's body, Ifans is perfectly cast and perfect in execution.

Small roles are filled by Robert Forster and Mary Kay Place, who with oodles of comic repression and deadpan glee essay Nathan's parents, and Rosie Perez, who is not nearly as annoying as I thought she'd be as Lila's aesthetician.

While not as easy a crowd-pleaser as Kaufman's previous work, "Human Nature" has its fair share of oddball moments. Enough so that anyone looking for another iconoclastic romp will do well enough if they look here.

Recommended: Yes