Krippendorf's Tribe is a wild and crazy comedy starring Richard Dreyfuss as an anthropologist who, having failed to find the lost New Guinea tribe he was looking for, creates one from scratch using the grass-skirted members of his immediate family. It's a well-known fact that anthropologists affect the data they collect by their very presence as data collectors, but Krippendorf doesn't stop there. Video camera in hand, he stages a "primitive" tribal ritual out by the garage in which one of his sons appears to whack off the other son's foreskin using a stone ax. If only in his own back yard, Krippendorf is breaking new ground. Yet another bad-dad-makes-good movie, Krippendorf's Tribe is set in motion by the death of Mrs. Krippendorf. ("Bummer," I jotted down in my little notebook.) Stricken with grief, Krippendorf blows all his grant money trying to hold his family together, but what his kids need--a father who isn't grief-stricken--money can't buy. Now it's time to present his research, which Krippendorf does in a lecture that might have been a comedy classic if it were, you know, funny. Improvising wildly, he starts talking about the Shelmikedmu, a tribe arranged into single-father families. The name he comes up with by combining his kids' names: Shelly, Mickey and Edmund. The behavior he comes up with by observing his own kids in the wild--i.e., at home. A forced farce, the movie works awfully hard for its laughs, of which there are a few. But director Todd Holland appears not to trust his script (with good reason). He allows composer Bruce Broughton to bombard us with a score that repeatedly asks the musical question "Is this movie funny or what?" And he pushes the actors way over the top--even Dreyfuss, who rarely needs pushing. Jenna Elfman, of "Dharma & Greg," does a nice rendition of a struggling actress; she doesn't play one, she is one. (She's playing a professor.) And Lily Tomlin, as Krippendorf's academic bête noire, strains mightily, not to maintain her dignity, but to lose it. She's aided in this endeavor by having to work with a little monkey named Popo who cuts farts. is a wild and crazy comedy starring Richard Dreyfuss as an anthropologist who, having failed to find the lost New Guinea tribe he was looking for, creates one from scratch using the grass-skirted members of his immediate family. It's a well-known fact that anthropologists affect the data they collect by their very presence as data collectors, but Krippendorf doesn't stop there. Video camera in hand, he stages a "primitive" tribal ritual out by the garage in which one of his sons appears to whack off the other son's foreskin using a stone ax. If only in his own back yard, Krippendorf is breaking new ground. Yet another bad-dad-makes-good movie, Krippendorf's Tribe is set in motion by the death of Mrs. Krippendorf. ("Bummer," I jotted down in my little notebook.) Stricken with grief, Krippendorf blows all his grant money trying to hold his family together, but what his kids need--a father who isn't grief-stricken--money can't buy. Now it's time to present his research, which Krippendorf does in a lecture that might have been a comedy classic if it were, you know, funny. Improvising wildly, he starts talking about the Shelmikedmu, a tribe arranged into single-father families. The name he comes up with by combining his kids' names: Shelly, Mickey and Edmund. The behavior he comes up with by observing his own kids in the wild--i.e., at home. A forced farce, the movie works awfully hard for its laughs, of which there are a few. But director Todd Holland appears not to trust his script (with good reason). He allows composer Bruce Broughton to bombard us with a score that repeatedly asks the musical question "Is this movie funny or what?" And he pushes the actors way over the top--even Dreyfuss, who rarely needs pushing. Jenna Elfman, of "Dharma & Greg," does a nice rendition of a struggling actress; she doesn't play one, she is one. (She's playing a professor.) And Lily Tomlin, as Krippendorf's academic bête noire, strains mightily, not to maintain her dignity, but to lose it. She's aided in this endeavor by having to work with a little monkey named Popo who cuts farts.
Speaking of bêtes noires, there's a queasy Amos 'n' Andy feeling coming off of everybody doing blackface. And the movie presents an offensively distorted notion of what it means to be a New Guinea tribesman--e.g., roast bat. "The movie's about how a dysfunctional family must become ultimate primitives in order to become civilized," producer Larry Brezner says in the press material. Monkey farts, the height of Western civilization.
