This was an opportunity for some truly biting satire, but it was instead a rather pedestrian and forgettable bit of fluff. Reading a description of the plot- "An ethically-challenged anthropologist concocts a completely fake tribe and fools the whole world"- it should be a brilliant send-up of the goofier aspects of anthropology. Perhaps a digression is in order.
Anthropology is a strange field. In their zeal to become as "objective" as the scholars of the natural sciences, anthropologists have sometimes forgotten that their subject of study is homo sapiens, a species which frequently frustrates attempts at "objective" scientific analysis (except where quantitative measurement is possible). Because of this, anthropology, during its long history, has seen more than its share of hoaxes, frauds, and rank nonsense (George Psalmanazar, Vilcabamba, the Tasaday, Margaret Mead and the Samoans, "The Third Eye", etc). Sometimes anthropologists are taken in by the wild tales of tribesmen playing a grand practical joke on gullible foreigners. Sometimes anthropologists exaggerate local peculiarities, ignoring the great similarities between the locals and Westerners- or, trying to prove that differences are only skin-deep, they do the opposite, ignoring obvious biological differences in favor of cultural explanations. At other times, anthropologists are taken in by complete fraudsters whose elaborate nonsense confirmed those anthropologists' preconceptions.
Undergirding and feeding nearly all such hoaxes is one constant- Western observers who project their own fantasies and pet theories onto strange and distant peoples about whom they have insufficient information. Whether it is Rousseau with his "Noble Savage", credulous 20th-century advocates of "free love", communitarian socialists, earnest anti-racism crusaders, or people desperate to explain away the differences between men and women as nothing more than "culturally constructed", anthropological frauds always find a fertile market among people who are more concerned with critiquing their own societies than with learning about strange ones. (None of this, by the way, is meant as a dismissal of the work of serious and sober anthropologists who study and analyze the human animal).
This constant is exactly what is missing in "Krippendorf's Tribe", and its absence means that the satire never bites or cuts, but only gently prods. As far as the film is concerned, the only thing driving the popular interest in "Krippendorf's Tribe" is simple prurience- part of the equation, no doubt, but only one aspect of a much larger issue in real-life frauds.
A better approach would have been to highlight the way that intellectuals could use a phony tribe to serve as a justification for their own crackpot theories about human society and human nature. "Krippendorf's Tribe" dances around this slightly, but we don't see much of it. Part of the problem is that Krippendorf himself remains more or less fully in control of whatever information comes out about his concocted tribe, the "Shelmikedmu". He only invents things on the spot, based on aspects of his own life. It would have been more pointed to see the Shelmikedmu tribe taking on a life of its own, with other hucksters, fraudsters, and over-zealous academics contributing their own (equally bogus) information and theories about the Shelmikedmu. Surely, someone with experience of backbiting and jealousy in academia could have helped sharpen the rather dull-edged satire here.
Another part of the problem is the film's attempt to manipulate us into looking at Krippendorf as a sympathetic character, despite his lies and fraud. The movies uses most of the classic techniques- his wife died, he was under stress, and one lie just snowballed into another in true Fawlty Towers fashion, until other, more sinister people started manipulating him into bigger and bigger lies. We have seen all of this before, and it's not very convincing. A better approach would have been to portray Krippendorf as an unalloyed con artist, morally dissolute and positively eager to tell any whopper to keep the fraud going. This would have opened up many more opportunities for the kind of first-rate satire that this film should have had in spades, but didn't.
At any rate, one does not wish to judge the film too harshly. The sexual jokes are crude and not nearly as funny as the filmmakers seem to think, but in most other respects, this film is adequate entertainment for a rainy afternoon in front of the TV.
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