Human Nature (film)
Encyclopedia
Human Nature is a 2001 American comedy film written by Charlie Kaufman
and directed by Michel Gondry
. The film stars Tim Robbins
, Rhys Ifans
, Miranda Otto
and Patricia Arquette
. It was screened out of competition at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival
.
, Human Nature follows the ups and downs of an obsessive scientist, a female naturalist, and the man they discover who was raised in the wild as an ape. As scientist Nathan trains the wild man Puff in the ways of the world (starting with table manners), Nathan's lover Lila fights to preserve the man's simian past, which represents a freedom enviable to most. In the power struggle that ensues, an unusual love triangle emerges exposing the perversities of the human heart and the idiosyncrasies of the civilized mind. Human Nature is a comical examination of the trappings of desire in a world where both nature and culture are idealized.
: Puff (Rhys Ifans
) testifies to Congress, Lila Jute (Patricia Arquette
) tells her story to the police, while a dead Nathan Bronfman (Tim Robbins
) addresses an unseen audience in the netherworld.
Lila is a woman with a rare hormonal imbalance which causes thick hair to grow all over her body
. During her 20s, Lila decides to leave society and live within nature where she feels free to exist comfortably in her natural state. She writes a successful book about her naked, savage, happy, and free life in the woods embracing nature. Then, at age 30, strong sexual desire causes her to return to civilization and have her hair removed in order to find a partner.
The partner she finds is Dr. Nathan Bronfman, a psychologist researching the possibility of teaching table manners to mice. Lila and Nathan go hiking in the woods one day. Lila sights a naked man in the woods who has believed himself to be an ape his entire life. Lila discards her clothes and chases him until he's cornered on a tree branch. The man falls off the branch and fall unconscious as Nathan comes along. Nathan brings this man to his lab where the man is named Puff. This name is after his French research assistant, Gabrielle's (Miranda Otto
) childhood dog. We discover later from her phone call to an unknown person that she is actually an American with a fake French accent. First with the help of Gabrielle and later with Lila’s help, Nathan performs extensive manner training on Puff. Eventually Lila decides to take Puff back into the forest to undo his manner training and return him to his natural state.
Lila and Puff live naked in the woods together until Nathan finds them one day and Puff kills Nathan. Lila turns herself in as the murderer and asks Puff to testify on the waywardness of humanity before he returns to his home in the forest.
Puff comes back out of the forest and gets into a car with Gabrielle, they both drive off to get food (she still speaks with a French accent).
At the end of the movie, there is a philosophical passage read while the credits appear. It is an excerpt of William of Ockham from Opera Theologica in which Ockham explains his theory of intuitive cognition. "Intuitive cognition is such that when some things are cognized, of which one inheres in the other, or one is spatially distant from the other, or exists in some relation to the other, immediately in virtue of that non-propositional cognition of those things, it is known if the thing inheres or does not inhere, if it is spatially distant or not, and the same for other true contingent propositions, unless that cognition is flawed or there is some impediment. [Opera Theologica I, p. 31]"
music video "Human Behaviour
" (1993), also directed by Michel Gondry.
, by the author Franz Kafka
, in which an ape addresses a scientific audience, explaining the difficulties he encountered while becoming a man.
was first interested in directing Charlie Kaufman
's script back in late 1996, when Kaufman was still trying to get Being John Malkovich
produced. Soderbergh's considerations for casting were for David Hyde Pierce
in the role of Nathan Bronfman, Chris Kattan
in the role of Puff (likely due to his character Mr. Peepers on Saturday Night Live
at the time), and Marisa Tomei
in the role of Lila Jute. He was about to go into pre-production when he was offered Out of Sight
and after much deliberation he left the project.
movie review aggregator site. Roger Ebert
, in a three-star (out of a possible four) review, lauded the film's "screwball charm".
Charlie Kaufman
Charles Stuart "Charlie" Kaufman is an American screenwriter, producer, and director. His film work includes Being John Malkovich, Human Nature, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Synecdoche, New York...
and directed by Michel Gondry
Michel Gondry
Michel Gondry is an Academy Award winning filmmaker, whose works include being a commercial director, music video director, and a screenwriter. He is noted for his inventive visual style and manipulation of mise en scène. - Life and career :...
. The film stars Tim Robbins
Tim Robbins
Timothy Francis "Tim" Robbins is an American actor, screenwriter, director, producer, activist and musician. He is the former longtime partner of actress Susan Sarandon...
, Rhys Ifans
Rhys Ifans
Rhys Ifans is a Welsh actor and musician. He is known for his portrayal of characters such as Spike in Notting Hill and Jed Parry in Enduring Love and as a member of the Welsh rock groups Super Furry Animals and The Peth. Ifans also appeared as Xenophilius Lovegood in Harry Potter and the Deathly...
, Miranda Otto
Miranda Otto
Miranda Otto is an Australian actress. The daughter of actors Lindsay and Barry Otto and the sister of actress Gracie Otto, she began acting at age eighteen, and has performed in a variety of independent and major studio films....
and Patricia Arquette
Patricia Arquette
Patricia T. Arquette is an American actress and director. She played the lead character in the supernatural drama series Medium for which she won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series....
. It was screened out of competition at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival
2001 Cannes Film Festival
The 2001 Cannes Film Festival started on May 14 and ran until May 25. The Palme d'Or went to the Italian film The Son's Room by Nanni Moretti.-Jury:* Liv Ullmann, President * Mimmo Calopresti * Charlotte Gainsbourg...
.
Overview
A philosophical burlesqueBurlesque
Burlesque is a literary, dramatic or musical work intended to cause laughter by caricaturing the manner or spirit of serious works, or by ludicrous treatment of their subjects...
, Human Nature follows the ups and downs of an obsessive scientist, a female naturalist, and the man they discover who was raised in the wild as an ape. As scientist Nathan trains the wild man Puff in the ways of the world (starting with table manners), Nathan's lover Lila fights to preserve the man's simian past, which represents a freedom enviable to most. In the power struggle that ensues, an unusual love triangle emerges exposing the perversities of the human heart and the idiosyncrasies of the civilized mind. Human Nature is a comical examination of the trappings of desire in a world where both nature and culture are idealized.
Cast
- Patricia ArquettePatricia ArquettePatricia T. Arquette is an American actress and director. She played the lead character in the supernatural drama series Medium for which she won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series....
: Lila Jute - Tim RobbinsTim RobbinsTimothy Francis "Tim" Robbins is an American actor, screenwriter, director, producer, activist and musician. He is the former longtime partner of actress Susan Sarandon...
: Nathan Bronfman - Rhys IfansRhys IfansRhys Ifans is a Welsh actor and musician. He is known for his portrayal of characters such as Spike in Notting Hill and Jed Parry in Enduring Love and as a member of the Welsh rock groups Super Furry Animals and The Peth. Ifans also appeared as Xenophilius Lovegood in Harry Potter and the Deathly...
: Puff - Rosie PerezRosie PerezRosa María "Rosie" Pérez is an American actress, dancer, choreographer, director and community activist.- Early life :...
: Louise - Miranda OttoMiranda OttoMiranda Otto is an Australian actress. The daughter of actors Lindsay and Barry Otto and the sister of actress Gracie Otto, she began acting at age eighteen, and has performed in a variety of independent and major studio films....
: Gabrielle - Peter DinklagePeter DinklagePeter Dinklage is an American film, television and theater actor. Since his breakout role in the 2003 film The Station Agent, he has acted in Elf, Underdog, Find Me Guilty, the 2007 film Death at a Funeral and its 2010 remake, and The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian...
: Frank - Mary Kay PlaceMary Kay PlaceMary Kay Place is an American actress, singer, director and screen writer. She is best known as portraying Loretta Haggers on the television series Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, a role which won her a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress - Comedy Series in 1977...
: Nathan's mother - Robert ForsterRobert ForsterRobert Forster is an American actor, best known for his roles as John Cassellis in Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool, and as Max Cherry in Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown, the latter of which gained him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor.- Early life :Forster was born Robert Wallace...
: Nathan's father - Hilary DuffHilary DuffHilary Erhard Duff is an American actress, singer-songwriter, entrepreneur, and author. After working in local theater plays and television commercials in her childhood, she achieved fame playing the title role in the Disney Channel television series Lizzie McGuire. She also reprised her role in...
: Young Lila Jute
Plot summary
Most of the movie is told as flashbackFlashback (narrative)
Flashback is an interjected scene that takes the narrative back in time from the current point the story has reached. Flashbacks are often used to recount events that happened before the story’s primary sequence of events or to fill in crucial backstory...
: Puff (Rhys Ifans
Rhys Ifans
Rhys Ifans is a Welsh actor and musician. He is known for his portrayal of characters such as Spike in Notting Hill and Jed Parry in Enduring Love and as a member of the Welsh rock groups Super Furry Animals and The Peth. Ifans also appeared as Xenophilius Lovegood in Harry Potter and the Deathly...
) testifies to Congress, Lila Jute (Patricia Arquette
Patricia Arquette
Patricia T. Arquette is an American actress and director. She played the lead character in the supernatural drama series Medium for which she won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series....
) tells her story to the police, while a dead Nathan Bronfman (Tim Robbins
Tim Robbins
Timothy Francis "Tim" Robbins is an American actor, screenwriter, director, producer, activist and musician. He is the former longtime partner of actress Susan Sarandon...
) addresses an unseen audience in the netherworld.
Lila is a woman with a rare hormonal imbalance which causes thick hair to grow all over her body
Hypertrichosis
Hypertrichosis is an abnormal amount of hair growth on the body; extensive cases of hypertrichosis have informally been called werewolf syndrome. There are two distinct types of hypertrichosis: generalized hypertrichosis, which occurs over the entire body, and localized hypertrichosis, which is...
. During her 20s, Lila decides to leave society and live within nature where she feels free to exist comfortably in her natural state. She writes a successful book about her naked, savage, happy, and free life in the woods embracing nature. Then, at age 30, strong sexual desire causes her to return to civilization and have her hair removed in order to find a partner.
The partner she finds is Dr. Nathan Bronfman, a psychologist researching the possibility of teaching table manners to mice. Lila and Nathan go hiking in the woods one day. Lila sights a naked man in the woods who has believed himself to be an ape his entire life. Lila discards her clothes and chases him until he's cornered on a tree branch. The man falls off the branch and fall unconscious as Nathan comes along. Nathan brings this man to his lab where the man is named Puff. This name is after his French research assistant, Gabrielle's (Miranda Otto
Miranda Otto
Miranda Otto is an Australian actress. The daughter of actors Lindsay and Barry Otto and the sister of actress Gracie Otto, she began acting at age eighteen, and has performed in a variety of independent and major studio films....
) childhood dog. We discover later from her phone call to an unknown person that she is actually an American with a fake French accent. First with the help of Gabrielle and later with Lila’s help, Nathan performs extensive manner training on Puff. Eventually Lila decides to take Puff back into the forest to undo his manner training and return him to his natural state.
Lila and Puff live naked in the woods together until Nathan finds them one day and Puff kills Nathan. Lila turns herself in as the murderer and asks Puff to testify on the waywardness of humanity before he returns to his home in the forest.
Puff comes back out of the forest and gets into a car with Gabrielle, they both drive off to get food (she still speaks with a French accent).
At the end of the movie, there is a philosophical passage read while the credits appear. It is an excerpt of William of Ockham from Opera Theologica in which Ockham explains his theory of intuitive cognition. "Intuitive cognition is such that when some things are cognized, of which one inheres in the other, or one is spatially distant from the other, or exists in some relation to the other, immediately in virtue of that non-propositional cognition of those things, it is known if the thing inheres or does not inhere, if it is spatially distant or not, and the same for other true contingent propositions, unless that cognition is flawed or there is some impediment. [Opera Theologica I, p. 31]"
Visual style
Several shots in Human Nature recreate scenes from the BjörkBjörk
Björk Guðmundsdóttir , known as Björk , is an Icelandic singer-songwriter. Her eclectic musical style has achieved popular acknowledgement and popularity within many musical genres, such as rock, jazz, electronic dance music, classical and folk...
music video "Human Behaviour
Human Behaviour
"Human Behaviour" is Icelandic singer Björk's first solo single, taken from the album Debut. It contains a sample of "Go Down Dying" by Antonio Carlos Jobim. The lyrics reflect on human nature and emotion from a non-human animal's point of view. The song is the first part of a series of songs that...
" (1993), also directed by Michel Gondry.
Cultural references
The film's structure closely follows the 1917 story A Report To An AcademyA Report to an Academy
A Report to an Academy" is a short story by Franz Kafka, written and published in 1917. In the story, an ape named Red Peter, who has learned to behave like a human, presents to an academy the story of how he effected his transformation...
, by the author Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka was a culturally influential German-language author of short stories and novels. Contemporary critics and academics, including Vladimir Nabokov, regard Kafka as one of the best writers of the 20th century...
, in which an ape addresses a scientific audience, explaining the difficulties he encountered while becoming a man.
Production
Steven SoderberghSteven Soderbergh
Steven Andrew Soderbergh is an American film producer, screenwriter, cinematographer, editor, and an Academy Award-winning film director. He is best known for directing commercial Hollywood films like Erin Brockovich, Traffic, and the remake of Ocean's Eleven, but he has also directed smaller less...
was first interested in directing Charlie Kaufman
Charlie Kaufman
Charles Stuart "Charlie" Kaufman is an American screenwriter, producer, and director. His film work includes Being John Malkovich, Human Nature, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Synecdoche, New York...
's script back in late 1996, when Kaufman was still trying to get Being John Malkovich
Being John Malkovich
Being John Malkovich is a 1999 American black comedy-fantasy film written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Spike Jonze. It stars John Cusack, Cameron Diaz, Catherine Keener, and John Malkovich, who plays a fictional version of himself...
produced. Soderbergh's considerations for casting were for David Hyde Pierce
David Hyde Pierce
David Hyde Pierce is an American actor and comedian best known for playing psychiatrist Dr. Niles Crane on the NBC sitcom Frasier, for which he received many accolades including four Emmy Awards for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series.-Early life:Pierce, the youngest of four siblings,...
in the role of Nathan Bronfman, Chris Kattan
Chris Kattan
Christopher Lee "Chris" Kattan is an American actor/comedian, best known for his work on Saturday Night Live.-Early life:Kattan was born in Sherman Oaks, California. His father, Kip King, was an actor and voice actor who appeared on the series Reno 911! as Larrie Plum. His mother, Hajnalka E....
in the role of Puff (likely due to his character Mr. Peepers on Saturday Night Live
Saturday Night Live
Saturday Night Live is a live American late-night television sketch comedy and variety show developed by Lorne Michaels and Dick Ebersol. The show premiered on NBC on October 11, 1975, under the original title of NBC's Saturday Night.The show's sketches often parody contemporary American culture...
at the time), and Marisa Tomei
Marisa Tomei
Marisa Tomei is an American stage, film and television actress. Following her work on As The World Turns, Tomei came to prominence as a supporting cast member on The Cosby Show spinoff A Different World in 1987...
in the role of Lila Jute. He was about to go into pre-production when he was offered Out of Sight
Out of Sight
Out of Sight is a 1998 American crime film. The film was directed by Steven Soderbergh and based on the novel of the same name by Elmore Leonard. It was the first of several collaborations between Soderbergh and star George Clooney. The film was released on June 26, 1998. It was nominated for two...
and after much deliberation he left the project.
Critical reception
Human Nature was met with mixed reviews, earning a 49% rating on Rotten TomatoesRotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes is a website devoted to reviews, information, and news of films—widely known as a film review aggregator. Its name derives from the cliché of audiences throwing tomatoes and other vegetables at a poor stage performance...
movie review aggregator site. Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert
Roger Joseph Ebert is an American film critic and screenwriter. He is the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.Ebert is known for his film review column and for the television programs Sneak Previews, At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, and Siskel and Ebert and The...
, in a three-star (out of a possible four) review, lauded the film's "screwball charm".
See also
- State of natureState of natureState of nature is a term in political philosophy used in social contract theories to describe the hypothetical condition that preceded governments...
- Deep ecologyDeep ecologyDeep ecology is a contemporary ecological philosophy that recognizes an inherent worth of all living beings, regardless of their instrumental utility to human needs. The philosophy emphasizes the interdependence of organisms within ecosystems and that of ecosystems with each other within the...
- Neo-tribalismNeo-TribalismNeotribalism or modern tribalism is the ideology that human beings have evolved to live in tribal society, as opposed to mass society, and thus will naturally form social networks constituting new "tribes."-Sociological theory:...
- Jean-Jacques RousseauJean-Jacques RousseauJean-Jacques Rousseau was a Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer of 18th-century Romanticism. His political philosophy influenced the French Revolution as well as the overall development of modern political, sociological and educational thought.His novel Émile: or, On Education is a treatise...
- Ishmael (novel)Ishmael (novel)Ishmael is a 1992 philosophical novel by Daniel Quinn. It examines mythology, its effect on ethics, and how that relates to sustainability. The novel uses a style of Socratic dialogue to deconstruct the notion that humans are the end product, the pinnacle of biological evolution...