Follicle follies has gotten a bad rap.

By Johnny Ray Huston

Human Nature

RHYMING "diabolical" with "follicle," a naked, furry, and voluptuous Patricia Arquette sings and dances through a prismatic forest. Arquette is playing Lila Jute, a woman whose hormones cause her to sprout hair where hair is usually not there. It's no coincidence that her magical forward movement – a form of walking that verges on floating – calls to mind Björk in the video for "Human Behavior": she's in a movie directed by the man who made that clip, Michel Gondry. A movie called Human Nature, which also owes a debt to Gondry's other celebrated Björk clip, "Bachelorette." In the latter video, Björk becomes a famous author, thanks to My Story, a self-writing Little Otik-like book that she discovers in the woods. In Human Nature, Arquette's Lila travels deep into the animal kingdom and emerges with her own best-seller. It's called Fuck Humanity.

That Patricia Arquette is not Björk is one thing Gondry's first feature has going for it. Lila gives Arquette's comparatively unaffected presence room to roam – nude and extremely hairy, she isn't merely comfortable (an achievement, considering the vanity of most female stars), she's resplendent. Human Nature's comedic quest for embarrassment is effectively painful when love forces Lila to shave off her full-body locks, pluck and paint her face, and bury herself beneath a wig. She looks like Mary Kay Place, which is the intended effect. Place is cast as a tyrant of table manners – the mother of Lila's boyfriend, Nathan Bronfman (Tim Robbins), a 35-year-old previously virginal psychologist who has a tiny penis and a corresponding tendency to utter the phrase "No biggie" when racing toward the disappointment that he's come, so to speak, to expect.

Human Nature's screenplay is by Charlie Kaufman, who occupies a quasar somewhere between Spike Jonze, Björk, and Gondry on an elite star map. Traces of Being John Malkovich have spilled from that film's portal into Kaufman's follow-up. Malkovich's megacluttered set design has acquired a cheery gloss. Cameron Diaz's pet ape – a substitute child – has taken the form of a pygmy-chimp wanna-be named Puff (Rhys Ifans), raised in the wild by an insane father. And Catherine Keener's Malkovich seductress has become Gabrielle (Miranda Otto), a pouty lab assistant who uses fake French – the title of a recent Le Tigre song, perhaps not so coincidentally – to unwrap Nathan's small package.

Much like Malkovich, Human Nature is a roundelay of misfired desires in which the least cunning identity thieves can't get no satisfaction. Problem is, Gabrielle's coy little girl routine and Puff's animal instinct – which survives even after Nathan has taught him to use words such as "shan't" – aren't as original as Malkovich's collection of character traits, and the jokes attached to them quickly become repetitive. Kaufman doesn't provide blazing insights, or even pick sides, in the battle between nature and culture. Instead, he uses the conflict to expose neurotic fault lines and compose a mini-encyclopedia of insecurities. The best entries are the most eccentric. Kaufman excels at underlining conversational quirks; his wit – like Wes Anderson's – often stems from an attention to detail, such as the myriad meanings attached to a salad fork.

The critical drubbing that Human Nature has received thus far seems a product of lofty expectations as much as the film's admittedly limiting "determinist" outlook (that adjective comes from the pages of Film Comment, which had no quarrel with the rigidly defined personalities of The Royal Tenenbaums). Kaufman on an off day out-I.Q.s his comic screenwriting contemporaries, and while Gondry doesn't extend the technical innovation of his videos, he still has a signature style of picture-making and motion – think back to Arquette's float through the forest. Human Nature offers no visual coup equal to the warring dioramas that close in on Björk in "Bachelorette," but it does have a natural woman named Patricia Arquette.

'Human Nature' opens Fri/12 at Bay Area theaters. See Movie Clock, in Film listings, for show times.