Grade: C

Verdict: Often clever but more often addled and too busy.

Details: Starring Tim Robbins, Patricia Arquette and Rhys Ifans. Directed by Michel Gondry. Rated R for sex, nudity and mild violence. One hour, 36 minutes.

See it: Local theaters and showtimes for Human Nature

Rate it: Write your own review

Review: Charles Kaufman wrote “Being John Malkovich” and that alone will probably draw a lot of movie-lovers to his sophomore scripting effort, “Human Nature.”

However, in this case, the willingness is not all. Or, perhaps, it's not enough to get you through “Human Nature,” a movie that falls victim to frazzled wackiness and frayed satire. Here's a picture that wants to seem relaxed and goofy, but it's actually as tightly wound as a Wall Street broker on a caffeine jag.

When Lila Jute (Patricia Arquette) hits puberty, she gets a training bra and a body covered with hair à la the famed circus performer, Jo Jo the Dog-faced Boy. Not being the freak-show type, she flees to the woods, where she lives au natural and becomes the best-selling author of the sort of back-to-nature self-empowerment books that end up in the Women's Studies section.

Lila loves nature until, well, nature calls. She'd like to have some sex and that's only going to happen if she returns to civilization. Fortunately, her gal-pal cosmetologist (Rosie Perez), who keeps her relatively hairless, knows somebody.

That's Nathan (Tim Robbins), a sexually repressed research scientist whose current project is teaching table manners to white mice, and the two are just odd enough to click. But one day, on a hike, they come across a feral man (Rhys Ifans, Hugh Grant's eccentric roommate in "Notting HIll," also naked a lot of the time).

For Nathan, he's the ultimate research project — an unspoiled someone he can introduce to “civilization.” Lila sees that he's a natural man about to be corrupted, but she's so in love with Nathan that she goes along with him.

This leads to the movie's funniest section — and it really is funny. In a perverse — perverted? — riff on “Pygmalion,“ Nathan teaches Puff, as the man is now known, how to be a civilized man. Which, for the priggish, out-of-touch Nathan, means an effete English gentleman circa 1938. Puff learns how to behave at the opera, how to do a wine tasting while wearing an ascot, how to choose the right fork for the salad course. Nathan's best advice to Puff: “Remember, when in doubt, don't ever do what you really want to do.“

Meanwhile, once let out of his Plexiglas cage, Puff tries to hump every female within, um, humping distance. You can take the man out of nature....

A lot of “Human Nature” is clever, even inventive. But you keep waiting for the film to take off. It does, but not in a good way. Rather it takes off in about a half dozen different directions. The movie is as busy and unfocused as a bright third grader with ADD — after consuming a bag of Hershey miniatures.

The cast does good work, especially Ifans, who makes Puff a truly unpredictable entity, trying to integrate his civilized and his natural self (as is everyone else). Director Michael Gondry, whose done videos for Bjork and commercials for Nike, has the right touch of manic, self-conscious bravado — his “natural” forest where Lila and Puff retreat is hilariously artificial — but he's as unfocused as the script. A playful camera just isn't what this whirling dervish of a movie needs.

“Human Nature“ never settles down enough to give itself a fair chance. The ever-present nudity and the non-stop “I want me some of that“ sex jokes become pretty pointless after a while. No one wants to see Kaufman stuck doing “Being John Malkovich 2, 3, or 406.” But we can hope that he learns from “Human Nature” and delivers something really cool the third time around.

— Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution