SUNDAY, MARCH 1. Everybody always talks about how brilliant the Wait Disney Company is at marketing, how it can take a movie like Beauty and the Beast and turn it into a wildly successful stage show in New York — complete with a pushcart out in front of the Palace Theater selling Disney tchotchkes. But right across the street from that pushcart is the threadbare Times Square triplex into which Disney has dumped its latest movie release, Krippendorf’s Tribe. This is a film that should have opened in art houses and been promoted as the literate adult farce it is. Instead, it has been dumped into second-tier theaters with an ad campaign that will appeal only to morons — perhaps because it was designed by morons whose reputation for marketing genius is undeserved.
Krippendorf’s Tribe is an academic satire, a farce about anthropology in the guise of a family comedy. Richard Dreyfuss plays the title character, a distinguished anthropologist whose success is largely due to his wife’s brilliance. She has died, and he has collapsed into a shambles, neglecting his three children and his work. He has been living off $ 100,000 in grant money for field research he has never conducted into a supposedly undiscovered tribe in New Guinea.
To keep himself out of prison — his department chairman has already had another grant bum hauled off to jail — he invents a tribe notable because the family unit is headed by a single parent. And he fabricates documentary evidence by splicing together real footage of New Guinea tribes together with staged footage of his children, Shelley, Mickey, and Edmund (from whose names he came up with his mythical tribe’s moniker, the Shelmikedmu).
His research stuns the anthropology world, in particular a randy young professor named Veronica Micelli (Jenna Elfman) whose lust for Krippendorf is exceeded only by her hunger for publicity and fame. She hooks him up with a new anthropology cable channel that is, of course, especially eager for footage of the sex life of the Shelmikedmu. Whom will Krippendorf recruit to stage this footage? And what of the rival professor, Ruth Allen (brilliantly played by Lily Tomlin), who has gone off to New Guinea to see whether she can duplicate Krippendorf’s research?
Like all satires, Krippendorf’s Tribe is, at root, a work of vicious cynicism — a corkscrew depiction of a world in which everybody is craven, nobody is admirable, and there is no hope. But in the hands of director Todd Holland and the Disney pablum machine, Krippendorf’s Tribe is very uncertain in tone, one moment a sentimental sitcom, the next a mistaken- identity farce. It could have been a genuinely great comedy, and I suspect that in the early stages of Charlie Peters’s screenplay, it was much darker and funnier.
I suspect that because Krippendorf’s Tribe is based on a 1985 novel by an English sociologist named Frank Parkin — one of those inspired works of academic satire that seem to pour inexhaustibly out of Britain. In Parkin’s uproarious and unsettling novel, Krippendorf is not a widower, but a cuckolded house-husband whose foreign-correspondent wife does everything she can to avoid coming home, knows nothing about her three children, and has contempt for her mate. His children are living as close to the state of nature as Islington will allow; when his prepubescent son is not trying to kill the neighbor’s animals, he is in trouble for doing things like reprogramming the school computer to erase Sociology from the curriculum. “I think,” Krippendorf explains, “he felt it was too heavily biased toward the positivist tradition.”
Krippendorf is not driven to invent the Shelmikedmu out of desperation, as the movie has it, but out of a simmering madness that comes from living in excessive proximity to anthropological texts — and with out-of-control children. His monographs and articles about the Shelmikedmu are hilarious examples of gobbledy-gook anthro-speak in which his deepest wishes are secretly fulfilled: “Shelmikedmu believe that children are the natural prey of malignant spirits. These spirits normally enter the child’s body through its mouth whenever adults are present. Consequently, children are required to keep their mouths tightly shut whenever they are in the company of men. Those who break these rules have their mouths stuffed with rancid cassava pulp and bound closed with strips of reed. . . . Boys and girls are required to keep their heads bowed whenever their father is present.”
Parkin’s conceit grows more and more involved as the Krippendorfs really do turn savage — staging a day-long celebration of the teenage daughter’s menarche, then (perhaps in tribute to Evelyn Waugh’s classic satire of Africa, Black Mischief) cannibalizing an evil nanny before heading off to the Amazon with a bunch of tourists whom they will presumably eat as well.
How Disney ever got interested in making a movie from Parkin’s splendid novel (now rereleased in paperback) is a great mystery. Nonetheless, Charlie Peters and Todd Holland did manage to turn out a decent, intelligent, if silly movie — not that you’d ever know. Maybe the Krippendorf family should cannibalize the Disney marketing department.
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 4. Literary adaptations have become all the rage, in part because there is so much hunger among adult audiences for great stories. But now movies are being made from famous novels that were not written for the purpose of telling a story but rather because their authors wanted to explore the complex inner nature of human consciousness. This is not what movies are for, to put it mildly. Indeed, it amazes anybody who has actually tried to read Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove that somebody made a movie out of it — much less one in which the camera spins around like a top as Helena Bonham Carter parades herself in the nude. Henry James is spinning in his grave faster than the camera.
But at least there is some kind of story in The Wings of the Dove. The whole point of the latest movie adaptation, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, is that it has no plot — it is a free-flowing account of a day in the life of a woman who throws a party and a man who kills himself, and it is entirely interior. I think it’s high-toned and dated nonsense, but whatever the merits or flaws of Mrs. Dalloway, the novel was an effort to do something movies cannot do and should not try to do: capture the stream of consciousness and the interior flow of human thinking.
The movie version of Mrs. Dalloway is hilariously awful. In an effort to portray the woodenness and banality of the title character’s life, the movie itself becomes wooden and banal. Vanessa Redgrave, a great actress notorious for her anti-Semitism, is unexpectedly terrible as Clarissa Dalloway — she walks through the movie with a weirdly beatific smile on her face as though she had just taken five hundred milligrams of Prozac and chased them with a giant martini.
Then there’s the “Septimus” problem. The suicidal character in the piece is named Septimus. Screenwriter Eileen Atkins never lets us forget this because she has Septimus’s wife, Rezia, refer to him by name in almost every single line of dialogue she speaks. “Septimus, I’m going for a walk.” “Septimus, people are staring.” “Septimus, what’s wrong?” “Septimus, what is it?” I half- expected him to turn to her and shout, “Yes, yes, my name is Septimus, we all know my name is Septimus, now would you shut up, already?” But alas, it was not to be.
Krippendorf’s Tribe is far more intelligent than Mrs. Dalloway, even though it is far less highfalutin’. Surely the people suffering through Mrs. Dalloway with me in their search for superior entertainment would have vastly preferred Krippendorf’s Tribe, but there’s not much chance they will ever see it.
Editor of the editorial pages of the New York Post, John Podhoretz is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
