Uncivilized 'Human Nature' fails to prove its thesis

Humans are too enamored of their intellectual progress, according to "Human Nature."

They'd be happier naked, free and uninhibited, romping through a forest.

Civilization, after all, is too … too inhibiting.

Charlie Kaufman, overly acclaimed for his "Being John Malkovich" screenplay, delivers this time a live-action adult cartoon that is smarmy and cynical in concluding: Shuck it all.

Directed by video and commercial-maker Michael Gondry, "Human Nature" entwines "Tarzan," "The Wild Child" and "Pygmalion" in a tale of faux intellectual sexcapades.

Nathan Bronfman (Tim Robbins) sits in limbo, a bullet through his forehead, as the story flashes back.

He was a 35-year-old sexually inexperienced scientist who lived by the credo, "When in doubt, don't do what you really want to do." For a while.

His parents (Robert Forster and Mary Kay Place) have a philosophy, too, expressed by the mother: "Never wallow in the filth of instinct."

Nathan, who supposedly has bad eyes (mentioned, then ignored), encounters three new species among humans.

One is Puff (Rhys Ifans), raised as a simian in a forest. Nathan places him in a laboratory glass cage, teaches him English and wraps an anti-sexual-stimulation collar around his neck.

Sexual responses result in zapping, but appetites are irrepressible.

Nathan concurrently and tentatively bonds with Lila Jute (Patricia Arquette), who herself lived in a forest from the time she was 12 and developed a hormonal imbalance that resulted in horrendous levels of body hair.

As an adult, she re-emerged in civilization as a nature-loving author.

Only Lila's confidant and electrolysis practitioner, Louise (Rosie Perez), knows for sure how chronic the patient's hair condition is. Lila has Nathan's attention for a while, but he's distracted by his manipulative lab assistant, Gabrielle (Miranda Otto).

"Human Nature" suggests that life is controlled by a single instinct and perverted by deprivation — that is, civilization.

Puff is worse for his encounters with education and repression.

Lila, despite being played as a smart and generous woman by the attractive Arquette, inexplicably offers no competition to the transparent Gabrielle.

Central character Nathan is an increasingly unsympathetic and off-putting figure whose behavior makes ever-less sense as the story progresses.

He isn't so much a person as he is a model of repression who handles liberation worse than Puff handles civilization.

The story doesn't develop organically. It's hammered this way and that to support a thesis it makes unpersuasively.

It strives for originality, but in the end it seems no fresher than the granddaddy of romantic cliches — the lighted-candles-in-the-bathroom tub scene.

Director: Michael Gondry
Stars: Tim Robbins, Patricia Arquette, Rhys Ifans
MPAA Rating: R, for sexuality/nudity and language