Jonze/Gondry's Human Nature

Serendipity is the word for 1999's Being John Malkovich, one of the most peculiar, original and profound American comedies since, well, Groundhog Day. On the page, it played like a screwball comedy written by Paddy Chayefsky; it shouldn't have worked, yet somehow it did. Music video director Spike Jonze shot it like a dark (visually, perhaps too dark) drama, and the cast played it as if they had no idea any of this stuff was funny (which made it funny). Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman was the picture's true star, delivering an oddball four-way love story, a meditation on acting and a philosophical statement about the durability and loneliness of the human soul, all wrapped up in a single mournfully amusing package.

The Malkovich filmmaking team is at it again, more or less, with Human Nature. The laughter feels a tad forced at times; here and there, you get the sense that writer Kaufman, producer Jonze and French director Michel Gondry are goosing the material to compensate for the fact that audiences know what they're in for. But you can't kill brilliance, and there's plenty on display here. Human Nature works as a second volume in the career of a writer who already looks like a major American humorist.

The title is at once grandiose and simple, and so is the movie. It's a comedy about a behavioral scientist (Tim Robbins), a man raised as an ape (Rhys Ifans, the roommate from Notting Hill) and a bestselling nature-book writer (Patricia Arquette) whose secret shame is a body completely covered with fine mammalian hair. (This might be the only comedy where the heroine's best pal and confidant is an electrologist.) The tale begins at the end, with the three major characters working their way toward telling you how they ended up in such an awful predicament. The author, Lila Jute, recounts the story of her lonely, hairy childhood to the cops who've arrested her for an undisclosed crime. (When she tells the cops, "My story begins when I was 12," one of the officers groans, "Jesus.") The behaviorist, a baby-faced, recently devirginized Nathan Bronfman (Robbins), has a bullet hole in his forehead and appears to be telling his story to somebody in the afterlife (he's seated in an elegantly furnished, all-white room that suggests the final setting of 2001: A Space Odyssey). The wild man, Puff, is testifying before a Senate subcommittee that's trying to get to the bottom of what happened; when the lawmakers betray condescension toward apes, Puff scolds, "Apes don't assassinate their presidents, gentlemen."

And what happened, you ask? It's better not to summarize the plot, because (a) it's consistently surprising, and I don't like spoiling surprises, and (b) in the end, it's the least of the film's achievements. Suffice to say that Nathan, Lila and Puff are three alienated loners who somehow come together in a scientific experiment/love triangle, and complications ensue from there. (A fourth major character, an allegedly French lab assistant played by Miranda Otto, is on hand to add another splash of sex and eccentricity.) Puff is called a "wild man" and an "ape man," but technically, that's wrong: he was raised naked in the woods by his dad, a deranged ex-office worker who believed himself to be a primate, and he now finds himself imprisoned by Nathan, who wants to "civilize" him, table manners first. Nathan was blandly terrorized in childhood by his Nurse Ratched-style perfectionist mommy (Mary Kay Place underplays the role to perfection; the great Robert Forster matches up nicely as Nathan's cheerfully clueless pop). As an adult, Nathan has become an officious, humorless lab drone who sees all humans as potential case studies; he's convinced that good table manners are the key to a civilized life. (Though Nathan eventually tries to teach table manners to Puff, his first subjects are white mice; the sight of itty bitty rodents manipulating itty bitty forks while seated at itty bitty dining tables is worth the price of admission.) Nathan falls in love with Lila, a sweet young woman whose pre-author life included an extended, Tarzan-style woodland sojourn and, before that, a degrading stint as a circus sideshow freak (she climbed a miniature Empire State Bldg. while being circled by a dwarf in a biplane costume).

It all sounds rather like a Farrelly brothers comedy, and in different hands, it might have played that way. But this bunch is too smart, spry and intelligent to settle for half-baked kookiness. Gondry and his game-for-anything cinematographer, Tim Maurice-Jones (Snatch), have created a media-age fairytale?a 500-channel cousin of Amelie that looks nothing like it, but takes a similar pleasure in constructing a purely subjective world from the ground up, detail by delightful detail. Some of the forest sequences were obviously shot on soundstages, and a cabin that serves as a key location is clearly, delightfully toy-size; when Lila accepts her hirsute fate, she sings a Disney-style "I gotta be me" power ballad while climbing up toward the sky. The flashbacks to Nathan's, Lila's and Puff's childhoods appear to have been shot on squarish 16-mm film (the corners of the frame are rounded!); the performances are intentionally stiff, the compositions flat; the film stock has been bled of every hue but red and brown. The result suggests a circa 1972 educational film that spent the last three decades baking in the trunk of a science teacher's Volvo. Despite minor flaws (a couple of slightly overplayed performances, Graeme Revell's "Aren't we all having fun?" score), Human Nature is a conceptually impressive picture.

Philosophically, it doesn't quite gel. Motifs are repeated but not always enlarged, the last third of the story devolves into pointlessly kinetic farce and Puff's behavior-modifying electroshock collar is overused for easy laughs. (South Park got there first.) But I quibble; minute for minute, the film's a gas. Kaufman, Gondry and company make some good, largely allusive points about how every supposed advance in human life (work, romance, marriage, child rearing, domestication generally, civilization as a whole) involves an element of playacting; we are civilized because for selfish reasons we've decided to be civilized, but we're constantly (again, for selfish reasons) tempted to revert to animal instinct. His script suggests that perhaps evolution was not a random convergence of biology and time, but an individual (and then collective) act of will; perhaps regression works the same way. In Kaufman's work, you are what you believe yourself to be, and what you believe yourself to be depends on what you want. The film's comic masterstroke: Puff, locked inside a glass cage in Nathan's laboratory, decides to play along with Nathan's "civilizing" experiments, not because he's an ignorant but hopeful savage who admires humankind, but because he's horny as hell and he realizes the sooner he learns to talk, dress himself and tell a shrimp fork from a salad fork, the sooner he'll be able to get the hell out of there and get his rocks off. Now that's human nature.

Framed

Horny bastard: Death to Smoochy is a one-joke comedy, but it's a good joke. Robin Williams is the corrupt kid-show icon who falls from grace and is replaced by Edward Norton's upbeat, scrupulously honest rising star, whose character, Smoochy the Rhino, soon becomes a national sensation. Cruel pranks, assassination plots and plentiful jokes about horns, assholes and dildos ensue. The film would have been richer, smarter and funnier if Williams' bad guy wasn't a hideous blowhard from frame one; if we'd seen a onetime kiddie entertainment star get canned simply for being too old, then spiraling into homicidal resentment of his younger successor, the film might have made salient points about the politics of showbiz (and politics, generally).

Nonetheless, there's plenty to see here. Director Danny DeVito shares Mel Brooks' ultimately limiting tendency to entertain us every second in every scene, and the movie's too broad and too loud for its own good. But he and screenwriter Adam Resnick think in pictures (the closing credits air ballet is as thrilling as anything in Human Nature), and the film's sense of humor is sincerely cynical and sometimes breathtakingly vulgar and cruel. Parts of Death to Smoochy are so funny they made my stomach ache?particularly a rancid practical joke that finds Smoochy on a set surrounded by beaming tots, reaching into a gigantic cookie jar during the show's popular Cookie Time segment, and producing...well, let's just say there's more than one way to eat it.