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Charlie Kaufman is one of the few screenwriters in Hollywood whose voice is unique and unmistakable. His latest, “Human Nature”, is like something out of Martin Amis or Will Self— a touch of sci-fi used to kick off a viciously unsentimental comedy of manners. Three characters are dissected in a quest for an understanding of the human condition, and the only unifying principle discernible in his circuitous tale is the ceaselessness of the heart’s anarchic impulses. Given this, Kaufman’s true source, here as in “Being John Malkovich”, is really Woody Allen. The story is an elaborate, often slapstick whirlwind of clashing self-interest which culminates in a typical Allen-esque conclusion: love makes its own rules, and all you can do is follow your heart and hope you come out on the right side of the ledger when the account is settled. But the peculiar pleasure in Kaufman’s writing draws a more natural comparison with fiction, not films. His breakthrough signals the latest stage in the evolution of the screenplay; writing for film is finally catching up to some of the techniques long employed by the modernist, or even post-modernist novelist. A laundry list of such techniques would be easy to produce (non-linear plots, characters aware of their own fictiveness, near abandonment of psychological causality, etc.) but essentially what Kaufman is doing is breaking all the rules, variously and how he likes, and throwing the pieces in our faces with a smirk. There are precedents for these tactics, of course, but rarely have they found as keen a custodian as Kaufman (it isn’t as wildly anti-formal as the French New Wave, for instance, but then again it isn’t nearly as obscure). The target of his satire is the endless conflicts men and women get into as they try and match up together, and his comedy uncovers, in the weirdest places, little gems of humor that reflect not only what it means to love another person, but also love’s destabilizing effect on our very identity.
The film’s central conceit, which apes “Tarzan”, isn’t overly funny, but the comedy resides in the smaller moments: how Puff’s father finds out Kennedy was assassinated only when a co-worker walks over and pointedly slaps a newspaper on his desk the next morning, or Nathan’s framed set of silverware on his apartment wall, or the utterly superfluous stuffed dog laying in front of the fake fireplace in Puff’s cage. More of these moments would have elevated “Human Nature”, which is clouded somehow by the inescapable sense that this is a decidedly minor work. Kaufman seems to have had more fun with the little details he added to complement his main idea, rather than the main idea itself. More problematically, Director Michel Gondry’s prosaic camerawork isn’t quite up to the task of successfully cataloguing Kaufman’s riot of parodies, daring to drape the material with a layer of coherence, of all things. This is a strong indication that Kaufman needs to bring his brilliant, idiosyncratic style to the screen unmediated by a collaborator. Until he gets behind the lens, though, Spike Jonze will do nicely, or perhaps those specialists in hyper-kinetic comic surrealism, David Fincher or Danny Boyle. In any case, Kaufman appears to be—so far—one of those maddening slacker geniuses who may end up drowning his gift in self-indulgent triviality. Two more films penned by Kaufman will be released within a year. It will prove fascinating to watch and see whether or not he accepts the mantle of greatness. |
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