Human Nature

I've long been a big fan of Charlie Kaufman's screenplays. I watched Adaptation four or five times in high school, picking up on new nuances each time. I didn't love Being John Malkovich, but its delightfully weird concept allows it to work where it would have fallen apart out of the gate in the hands of virtually anyone else. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is my absolute favorite love story of all time because it puts the best and worst parts of being in love on full display without sugar-coating any of the nastiness; it's also masterful at on-screen representations of memories and dreams. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, very much the black sheep in Kaufman's filmography, was a decent enough movie; apparently Kaufman was unhappy with all of the liberties director George Clooney took with his script. And Synecdoche, New York - Keith, I know you think that's one of the most pretentious films ever made, but damn did I love most elements of it, even if I'll agree that Roger Ebert dubbing it the best movie of the decade was a stretch.

Anyway, the one Kaufman film I'd never seen until tonight was Human Nature, probably his vaguest and least popular movie. I liked it! I didn't love it as much as most of the aforementioned movies, but it told an interesting story about some interesting characters and it was consistently funny enough - quirky funny, not laugh-out-loud funny or upbeat funny, but not as dull or dry as, say, Being John Malkovich. Actually, maybe that movie was hilarious. It probably deserves a rewatch, as I haven't seen it in ten years or so. I think what was lacking in Human Nature was the very theme you'd expect it to have. Allow me to make a boldly obvious statement here, but all great stories deal with human nature; what drives us to do the things we do, how do we react to challenges and stress, what are our fatal flaws, and so on. I that regard, Human Nature deals with human nature, but no more than any decent movie. Instead, it kind of suggests and hints at all sorts of ideas about what separates (or doesn't separate) people from animals. The three main characters are a woman who lives in the wild for an extended period in order to write nature memoirs, a feral man who picks up on language and civility rather quickly, and the psychologist who teaches him how to do so. There's a plot in there - a good one, really, in which characters grow and change and make rash decisions and all - but the thematic exploration doesn't go so deep. That's fine; human behavior is such an extensive concept, and it'd be pretty tough to say something meaningful about it in an enjoyably-paced hour-and-a-half. But if movies like Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine, and Synecdoche are setting the bar here, then Human Nature falls short. It's a fun enough movie that I'd recommend it to anyone, but there are multiple better Charlie Kaufman movies out there; don't let this one be your first.