Human Nature Details

Charlie's Apes

This is recognisably a Kaufman film, with all the usual preoccupations. Tim Robbins stars as Dr Bronfman (usually pronounced to rhyme with Kaufman, hmmmmm), a scientist obsessed due to his traumatic childhood with teaching table manners to mice. He begins a romance with Lila (Patricia Arquette), a young woman who has become an outcast from society due to her embarrassing hirsutism problem. Into this equation enters Rhys Ifans' 'Puff', a man who has been brought up in the forest believing himself to be a pygmy chimp; and finally there is Dr Bronfman's glamorous French lab assistant Gabrielle (Miranda Otto - Eowyn from LotR, hobbit fans!), whose romantic designs on her boss caused her to remind me of Mary Svevo from Eternal Sunshine to a suspicious degree.

The development of this love square is extremely chaotically framed - frankly the script is all over the place, but I've always had the impression that this was the default setting for Kaufman's writing. But there are plenty of moments of genius, as you'd expect. The little mice with electrodes in their brain being forced to eat their salad with the outermost fork are worth the admission price on their own, and Rhys Ifans steals the show as Puff, forced to transition from furiously masturbating monkey man to a perfect gentleman equally at home reading Wittgenstein or dancing the tango. Then there's Dr Bronfman's parents' new and better six-year-old son, Wayne, whose unfailing ability to provoke Bronfman's rivalry and inferiority complex makes several dinner table scenes an absolute delight.

There's as much that's thought-provoking here as in any other Kaufman film, too, despite the lewd comedy overtones. Is it better to live as a beast giving free rein to all desires, or as a repressed and unhappy civilised being? I won't give away the ending, but suffice to say it's surprising and very entertaining.

All in all, if you're a fan of Charlie Kaufman, track this down. It's nowhere near his best, but it's far from mediocre and definitely well worth your time.

[Highly rated reviewer]

Human Nature

Michel Gondry’s first collaboration with Charlie Kaufman is a mad, scattershot thing. The performers (Tim Robbins, Rhys Ifans, Patricia Arquette and Miranda Otto) all get the wacky tone right but it lacks both the connection to reality that made Eternal Sunshine so moving and the absolutely out there insanity that made Being John Malkovich so striking. It ends up somewhere in the middle; eccentric, relatively entertaining, and sometimes very funny (particularly Otto’s contribution and a cameo from Peter Dinklage) but there’s no real through line, and little to care about.