human nature

Oh dear.

I think I've made it pretty clear that I've really enjoyed the Charlie Kaufman films I've seen. Been John Malkovich was brilliantly inventive and funny. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was clever and genuinely touching. Adaptation was multi-layered and twistedly self-referential.

Okay, I'd only seen three, but then only six films he's scripted have been made. I therefore endeavoured to rent the others, and the first that turned up was Human Nature.

And it's not as good as the others.

The problem is that it's slightly too surreal. There's a strong surrealist element to all the other films of course, but here the surrealism is handled a little differently. In the other films, you can kind of believe them and the surrealism is in-built. In Human Nature the surreal element is not wrapped up in anything believable.

Let's put it this way - in Human Nature one of the central characters is a scientist who's obsessed with manners and is trying to teach animals to have manners. His basic theory runs something along the lines that if he can teach animals manners then eventually he can teach humans manners too.

This is plainly bonkers - he's human, his adoptive parents who instilled this obsession with manners in him were human. He ends up going out with a human girl whose manners he corrects. And how would he ever get his research funded?

Then you've got a girl who grows loads of hair as if she were an ape. In one bizarre scene she suddenly breaks out in song like the film is going to be a musical. But it isn't. She, apparently, becomes a writer, despite completely isolating herself away in a woods where, one assumes, there's no access to paper or a pencil, or a typewriter, or a computer, let alone a phone to call an agent or a post office to post her manuscripts from.

Oh, and eventually she decides to get electrolysis, but in the mean time shaves herself, but her boyfriend doesn't notice.

It's all just weird and there's not the aforementioned trick of wrapping it up in just enough normalcy to make you buy it. And you need to buy it, because the wider points he's making fall on deaf ears if it's just a silly movie of people being stupid.