Human Nature
With Patricia Arquette, Tim Robbins, Rhys Ifans, Miranda Otto, Robert Forster, Mary Kay Place, Rosie Perez, and Miguel Sandoval.
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The film has three central characters who take turns narrating portions of their collective story in flashbacks: After being arrested for murder, Lila (Patricia Arquette) begins by saying, “I’m not sorry.” Puff (Rhys Ifans) testifies before a congressional committee, saying, “I’m sorry.” And Nathan (Tim Robbins), the murder victim, sits in an all-white antechamber of some sort with a bullet in his head, declaring, “I don’t even know what ‘sorry’ means anymore.” Then, like characters in a Kurt Vonnegut novel, they proceed to explain what they mean.
So far, so good–or is it? At 30, Lila is so sexually frustrated she returns to civilization and submits to electrolysis done by her friend Louise (Rosie Perez), who matches her up with Nathan, now a 35-year-old virgin; Louise knows about him because her psychiatrist husband (Miguel Sandoval) has him as a client (lack of discretion on the part of a therapist appears to be taken for granted). Lila and Nathan–who knows nothing of her past and condition–immediately hit it off, and when they discover Puff in the woods, they take him back to Nathan’s lab and place him in a glass cage. Using an electric collar as discipline, they then teach him “civilization”–which to them means curbing his sexual appetites, using the proper fork, and cultivating an appreciation for opera and poetry. Unfortunately, in the meantime Nathan has developed a crush on his French lab assistant Gabrielle (Miranda Otto) and winds up leaving Lila for her when he discovers Lila is still growing body hair (which she’s been shaving in secret).
What we see of “nature” in Human Nature consists exclusively of parodies of Hollywood stereotypes, such as Tarzan swinging on vines and Lila singing to the forest animals like a Disney heroine. What we perceive as Gabrielle’s Frenchness is no less cartoonlike. By calling itself Human Nature, this movie is implicitly asking us to take these stereotypes as universal archetypes–a kind of TV shorthand for what we should immediately recognize as “French,” “civilization,” “science,” “nature,” and even “human.” This is one reason Lila, Puff, Nathan, and Gabrielle don’t register as characters with any substance, human or otherwise, and it’s why we can’t really care about them or find much meaning in what happens to them.
