SUNDANCE: ‘Human Nature’ an absurd look at life
Human Nature takes place in a world so absurd a man can live his entire life on the outskirts of town and believe himself to be totally isolated. He also believes he’s an ape.
Unluckily for him, he is captured by a woman so hairy her only choice is to live like an ape and is subsequently caged by a scientist whose obsession with table manners has defined his life and his career.
The next rational step in this story is to teach the ape-man culture and refinement. Scientist Nathan Bronfman, played by Tim Robbins, believes the world has lost touch with the refinement which makes life worth living. His life’s work is to teach manners to everyone and everything. (He is currently teaching table manners to laboratory mice.) Upon discovering the ape-man, which he names Puff, he decides to abandon the mice and take on the task of turning Puff into a gentleman.
He does so with the help of his assistant Gabrielle, played by Miranda Otto. Bronfman and Gabrielle are having an affair, the fruits of which Puff is often a witness to as they shamelessly make love in front of him. Puff is inspired, and in his own words, “decides he really wants to get some of that.”
This becomes the primary motivation for Puff’s education, and his progress from beast to man is rapid. Soon he becomes the model human being – reading philosophy, coordinating his outfits and speaking more eloquently than his teacher. Soon after, Bronfman decides to release Puff from his cage and set him loose upon the world.
Upon his release, we are quickly reminded of his primary motivation for learning, and when Puff begins romancing women with the leg-humping subtlety of a drunken frat pledge, he is quickly caged and retrained.
The rest of the story takes a turn for the philosophical. As Puff ventures further out of his cage, he discovers a world of vice and corruption to which he is inevitably drawn. While on the surface Puff acts the part of the model human, we learn he is living a secret life of addiction to alcohol and prostitutes.
This brings us back to the character of the hairy woman Lila Jute, played by Patricia Arquette. During a self-imposed exile from society, she learns an appreciation for the purity of nature while living in the mountains near town. Thanks to the miracle of electrolysis, Lila has since returned to town. She is married to Bronfman and for a long time is unaware of his affair with Gabrielle.
She eventually discovers his impropriety, and predictably snaps. Unhappy with her own life, she also begins to see the corrupting affect life among humans has had on Puff. Lila then decides to rescue him by kidnapping him, driving him to the woods and retraining him to be an ape again. The training takes, and for a time the two live happily together, naked, in the trees. That is until tragedy strikes.
Now the story takes a turn for the surreal. Somehow in the end, professor Bronfman is murdered, Puff is sent to testify before Congress about the ills of society and Lila is sent to jail. After testifying, Puff returns to the woods, followed by a throng of reporters. As he departs into the trees, everyone loses interest and leaves. That could have been the end, but it wasn’t and we are shown the corrupting vices of society are not so easily given up.
This film could have been better. The story was silly and the characters were made to be so intentionally quirky it was impossible to relate to them. What made the tone difficult to discern was that it wandered from waxing dogmatic and moral in its message to being cheeky and nonsensical. These clashing styles made it almost impossible to discern the film’s message.
Then again, this is avant guard filmmaking we’re talking about. If the movie’s creators were trying to create something that was equal parts Rousseau and Voltaire, they came pretty close. The problem is the two just didn’t mix very well.