Cannibalizing Literature

...Nonetheless, Charlie Peters and Todd Holland did manage to turn out a decent, intelligent, if silly movie—not that you'd ever know...

...Boys and girls are required to keep their heads bowed whenever their father is present...

...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...

...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...

...How Disney ever got interested in making a movie from Parkin's splendid novel (now rereleased in paperback) is a great mystery...

...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...

...Parkin's conceit grows more and more involved as the Krippendorfs really do turn savage—staging a daylong 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...

...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...

...In an effort to portray the woodenness and banality of the title character's life, the movie itself becomes wooden and banal...

...Septimus, what is it...

...But at least there is some kind of story in The Wings of the Dove...

...She has died, and he has collapsed into a shambles, neglecting his three children and his work...

...Consequently, children are required to keep their mouths tightly shut whenever they are in the company of men...

...Maybe the Krippendorf family should cannibalize the Disney marketing department...

...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...

...Whom will Krippendorf recruit to stage this footage...

...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...

...Septimus, what's wrong...

...Dal-loway, 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...

...Dalloway, even though it is far less highfalutin...

...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 Krip-pendorf is exceeded only by her hunger for publicity and fame...

...This is not what movies are for, to put it mildly...

...Krippendorf's Tribe is an academic satire, a farce about anthropology in the guise of a family comedy...

...Cannibalizing Literature The Movie Makes the Book Look Better By John Podhoretz Sunday, March 1. Everybody always talks about how brilliant the Walt 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...

...Septimus, people are staring...

...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...

...when his prepu-bescent 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...

...Henry James is spinning in his grave faster than the camera...

...The movie version of Mrs...

...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...

...The whole point of the latest movie adaptation, Virginia Woolf's Mrs...

...Septimus, I'm going for a walk...

...The suicidal character in the piece is named Septimus...

...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...

...His children are living as close to the state of nature as Islington will allow...

...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...

...Dal-loway is hilariously awful...

...These spirits normally enter the child's body through its mouth whenever adults are present...

...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...

...Dal-loway, 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...

...Those who break these rules have their mouths stuffed with rancid cassava pulp and bound closed with strips of reed...

...I think," Krippendorf explains, "he felt it was too heavily biased toward the posi-tivist tradition...

...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...

...I think it's high-toned and dated nonsense, but whatever the merits or flaws of Mrs...

...Dalloway with me in their search for superior entertainment would have vastly preferred Krippen-dorf's Tribe, but there's not much chance they will ever see it...

...Then there's the "Septimus" problem...

...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...

...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...

...brilliance...

...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...

...Richard Dreyfuss plays the title character, a distinguished anthropologist whose success is largely due to his wife's Editor of the editorial pages of the New York Post, John Podhoretz is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard...

...Krippendorf's Tribe is far more intelligent than Mrs...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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 alas, it was not to be...

...Surely the people suffering through Mrs...