Two observations come to mind after watching Human Nature: Either Patricia Arquette was raised in a hippie commune or she's just very comfortable in the nude. Wandering through the Central Park Zoo, the 34-year-old actress is demurely dressed in an I heart New York T-shirt, jeans and a long tan coat. She smokes clove cigarillos, which, because they're so long and she's so small, lend her the appearance of someone who's familiar with South American politics. But for the benefit of the pandas and penguins, she sticks to topics like unwanted hair, puberty gone haywire and how you can't always get what you want.
"Do you think he's molting for the winter?" Arquette asks, watching a brownish polar bear laze on a rock. "Those kinds of bears travel for miles. They do a good job here, but it's sort of depressing." The Zoo's a strange place to talk about relationships, but it's in keeping with the theme of Arquette's new film. A satire on the concept of humanity's purity in nature -- which is why, on a balmy spring day, we're conversing at a kind of wildlife preserve in the middle of Manhattan -- Human Nature is about how you can escape the city but how you can't escape yourself, especially if you're covered in fur. That's a stance the monkeys seem comfortable enough with, but it's something Arquette's character has to learn the hard way.
She's played women with problems before, but none of them have ever presented problems quite so hairy. In the new comedy, written by Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich), Arquette stars as Lila Jute, a woman whose name sounds as Nordic as her hormones are unbalanced. Afflicted with a disorder that causes hair to grow all over her body, Lila endures a nightmare adolescence strangled by conventional notions of beauty, and she's convinced she'll be unlucky in love. (This isn't the sort of hair she can simply shave off, though she tries -- we're talking pelt.) Instead of self-destructing or bathing in Nair, Lila heads for the woods, lives naked and free, and becomes the best-selling author of non-fiction nature books, only to realize that a life without love isn't worth living. She returns to the city, depilates and is introduced by her electrolysist (Rosie Perez) to an incredibly repressed behavioral scientist named Nathan Bronfman (Tim Robbins) who's teaching table manners to mice. They fall in love -- or what passes for it in Charlie Kaufman's universe -- and, during a romantic walk in the woods, encounter Puff (Rhys Ifans), a wildman of the forest. Nathan seizes the opportunity to civilize Puff. He enlists Lila's help. Hijinx ensue.
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