Human Nature
No one should ever expect Charlie Kaufman to write simple, easily digestible movies with cardboard characters and hackneyed story lines. Kaufman first garnered attention, as well as an Academy Award nomination, for his brashly original screenplay for 1999's ''Being John Malkovich,'' in which a hidden office door led to a portal in Malkovich's head. The film was provocative, funny, and even poignant.
He greatly ups the weirdness ante with ''Human Nature,'' but with less success in this dark little comedy. There's too much forced quirkiness, and it swamps his characters' humanity. The stranger things get, the less one cares about these people. The film is told in flashbacks by its three main characters: Lila (Patricia Arquette), a hormonally hirsute woman; her unfaithful scientist-husband, Nathan (Tim Robbins); and Puff (professional scene stealer Rhys Ifans), a wilderness-raised man who quickly learns that animals are far more civilized than human beings.
All of them are damaged in their own way, perhaps none more so than Lila, born with a condition that causes her to sprout copious amounts of body hair. By the time she's 20, she's performing as a circus freak, ''Queen Kong,'' cavorting atop a fake Empire State Building. After fleeing her city life for a forest, she becomes a nature author. In hopes of finding a man, she returns to the city, undergoing electrolysis treatments. Her pal, Louise (Rosie Perez), introduces her to Nathan, a behavioral scientist who, at 35, is a virgin and spends his time trying to teach white mice table manners.
On a trek through the woods, they stumble upon a naked young man, Puff, who was raised as an ape by his loopy father. Nathan takes him on as a project to see if he can civilize this feral man.
As Puff, Ifans is a delight. He runs around as naked as an egg, slowing evolving into a cultured, ''Moby-Dick''-reading, pipe-smoking gentleman. More should have been made of Puff's observations about human behavior, which here seems to mean being something other than what you truly are. Each character lives behind a facade, including Gabrielle, Nathan's hot-to-trot French lab assistant, played by Miranda Otto.
Arquette and Robbins start off fine, but after one plot leap too many their characters don't have anywhere left to go. There are some genuine laughs here, especially as Ifans struggles to control his animal instincts in the presence of attractive women. But the laughs don't come hard and fast enough. The more outlandish things get, the harder it is for director Michel Gondry to rein things in.
In ''Being John Malkovich,'' Kaufman made the absurd - the ability to enter another human being's head for 15 minutes - seem believable. Here, it's just weirdness for the sake of weirdness, and where ''Human Nature'' should be ingratiating, it's just grating.
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