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Nathan Bronfman (Tim Robbins) finds himself stuck
in a bleached limbo in Human Nature.
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The one movie that continues to make me laugh out loud is Human Nature, a Darwin-inspired satire from director Michel Gondry and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. Its story follows the travails of Nathan Bronfman (Tim Robbins), a scientist who teaches good table manners to mice; his girlfriend, Lila (Patricia Arquette), a nature writer with excessive body hair; and their discovery, an ape man nicknamed Puff (Rhys Ifans), whom Nathan wants to civilize and Lila wants to return to the forest.
Human Nature has the supersonic pace of a screwball classic like Howard Hawks' Bringing Up Baby (1938). In Hawks' film, Cary Grant's scientist tangles with Katherine Hepburn's heiress and her pet leopard while he tries to reconstruct a dinosaur skeleton. Hawks' suggestion is that modern man is far removed from his prehistoric origins. A similar message can be found in Human Nature. When Robbins' intellectual scientist tussles with Ifans' horny ape man, the evolutionary ladder turns upside-down with the scientist finding himself a few rungs lower.
"I'm a big fan of the comedians from the silent era, people like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton," says Gondry, speaking recently. "Those were more about telling a story. When movies became talkies, they regressed and became like stage plays.
"If you look at Chaplin's comedies, you see how the best laughter comes from surprises. That's something I also wanted to create. I wanted to surprise people and make them laugh."
Gondry, 38, a popular director of music videos and television commercials, has the mindset for a director of screen comedies. He's created singing bellybuttons for a Levi's blue jeans commercial and an enchanted forest for a music video starring Icelandic Pop singer Björk. His knack for fantasy makes an indelible impact on Human Nature. Lila and Puff swing through a forest like Tarzan and Jane. Puff's home is a makeshift apartment encased in glass. Throughout the movie, Nathan addresses the audience from an eerie limbo, a room where everything is painted white. The comedies surrounding Human Nature at area cinemas are dull by comparison. More importantly, they're also laughless.
As a pair of singles trying to reconnect with their dream man, Cameron Diaz and Christina Applegate get down and gooey in the gross-out comedy The Sweetest Thing, proving that a woman's touch means little when it comes to poorly conceived comedy. National Lampoon's Van Wilder is a collegiate comedy that tries to compensate for its lack of jokes with gross-out shocks that make The Sweetest Thing look child-friendly. Vacant comedies like Sorority Boys and Slackers fall into the same gross-out trap. On the flip side, Life or Something Like It, a Frank Capra-inspired social comedy starring Angelina Jolie as a superficial TV reporter with one week to live, fails to offers gross-out shocks or sizable laughs.
Human Nature and the girl-meets-girl romance Kissing Jessica Stein being the two exceptions, it's becoming clear that we are living in a bad era for comedy. Maybe the world has turned too violent. Perhaps movie audiences are too stunned from recent terrorist attacks to connect with comedies. Patriotic battle movies and taut thrillers are all the rage. Comedies have been pushed aside for another time.
"Human Nature was shot before Sept. 11, so there is nothing I can do about that," Gondry says. "I do know that when my father was really sick, I was at his house and he wanted to watch a movie, a really broad comedy. He wanted to see it with my younger brother and I, because he knew we would laugh very hard and it would make him feel better. You feel bad and you watch a comedy and you feel better. I guess it's easier to make people sad rather than happy."
With few good comedies at area cinemas, I've been finding my laughs on DVD reissues of classic farces like Preston Sturges' Sullivan's Travels and Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot. Wilder's recent death makes the laughter over Some Like It Hot -- especially Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon's clumsy cross-dressing -- all the more poignant. I've re-read classic books about Wilder, including Billy Wilder by Axel Madsen and Journey Down Sunset Boulevard: The Films of Billy Wilder by Neil Sinyard and Adrian Turner. But my personal tribute to Wilder can be found in an elaborate coffee table book solely about Some Like It Hot -- the priciest film book I've ever bought, equaling a small stack of movie tickets. Its been reported that Marilyn Monroe is Wilder's least favorite star, so the idea of a pricy Some Like It Hot book would probably strike Wilder as foolishly extravagant.
Still, it's great to see Some Like It Hot receive the star treatment, just as it's great to see all the posthumous acclaim for Wilder's work. Comedies fail to attract much critical acclaim. This was the sole reason a friend of mine gave for predicting Moulin Rouge's strike-out at this year's Oscars. A year from now, I hope Human Nature receives some kind of recognition. It's too funny to be completely forgotten. I also hope Gondry and Kaufman become the filmmaking equivalent of Wilder and his frequent screenwriter partner, Charles Brackett. After their next project, a film about a man who erases the memories of a bad relationship from his mind, I'd like to see them try their hands at a political farce about the hunt for Al Qaeda leaders. I'm thinking something along the lines of Ernst Lubitsch's anti-Nazi comedy To Be or Not To Be. The idea alone is enough to make my stomach hurt from laughing. ©
