Z/Web

Author: Charlie Kaufman

I’m a huge Kaufman fan and was shocked to discover that he’d written this film which sounded bad in the previews. Guess what? The previews are brilliant compared to the movie, which fails miserably. The movie’s supposed to be a comedy, but the jokes fall flat. It’s about a woman who’s got a rare genetic disorder that causes hair to grow all over her body like an ape. She leaves human society and lives like an ape and is happy. She becomes a nature writer and is very successful. But she has no man until she meets a weird scientist who’s trying to teach table manners to mice. Together they discover a savage ape-man living in the wilderness and civilize him. She’s against this as she thinks nature is beautiful, but her husband thinks civilization is superior. You can see the conflict here. Unfortunately, that conflict is buried within a mess of plotting such as extra-marital affairs, the fact that the whole movie is a flashback as the woman tells the story to the cops after she’s been arrested for shooting her husband, and worse. We end up with a jumbled mess that’s not funny, that does not enlighten us at all about nature or human behavior (the key joke seems to be that humans act like animals and animals are the more human — not only is that not profound or accurate, it’s not even funny), and degrades into a series of pointless sex jokes involving the ape-man who cannot restrain his natural urges. There are some attempts at humor — the scientist’s bizarre parents who send him to bed without supper when he uses the wrong fork at dinner — but most of these are of the “smile” variety of humor, not the laugh out loud kind, and this film desperately needs the latter. Whatever intellectual innovations Kaufman had planned for the story are either too subtle or aren’t there at all, and in the end we just get a unpleasant muck that’s not worth even the effort of pushing “play” on the DVD player. Skip it.