The Gods Must Be Crazy

The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980)

On Demand, Seattle, WA

December 08, 2007

**** / ****

by Scott Muoio

Cult movies come in two varieties: those we love to watch over and over and over again, and those we love to talk about but don’t particularly enjoy watching. The Gods Must Be Crazy, the 1980 fish out of water anthropological slapstick comedy (how’s that for a niche genre!?), falls into the latter category and is a riotous good time. Other films may be better, more noteworthy, funnier, more quotable, and more enjoyable viewing, but few will ever be as memorable as this unique entry in cinematic history.

The Gods tells the story of a nomadic dessert tribe living in Botswana. After discovering a coca-cola bottle discarded out the window of a passing airplane, the selfless and harmonious men and women of the tribe get an instant dose of capitalist modern society as ownership enters their lives for the very first time. Quarreling for a time over “the evil thing,” it is decided by one of the tribe’s leaders, N!xau (pronounced N-<click your tongue>-ow) that he will take the evil thing, march to the end of the earth, and throw it over the edge. So begins N!xau’s journey out of the dessert and into modern society where a plethora of slapsticky encounters with urban dwellers follows.

To see the happy-go-lucky, inquisitive face of N!xau is to instantly fall in love with him. Though he is generally playing little more than a stereotypical version of himself under the thumb of the director, if ever there was perfect type casting this is it. Without his electric cinematic presence and affably adorable face and mannerisms, The Gods would be a good movie but surely would not have been the international phenomenon that it rightfully became in the early 1980s. With him, it is one of the most curious cult-films of all-time and worthy of its praise and numerous awards.

The first 45 minutes of the film, which contrast the tribesmen with modern society and is told almost exclusively in voice over by the brilliant Paddy O’Byrne, is some of the best and most engaging film making I have ever witnessed. Contrasting the simple life of N!xau and his tribe with the typical silliness of modern office life, industry, and the general nine-to-five, commute, eat, sleep, and do it all over the next day lifestyle is brilliant. During those 45 minutes I laughed, I pondered, and I wanted to call all my friends and have them come over right away to laugh at ourselves; this portion of the film is that good. The following hour and a half isn’t quite as good but satisfies nonetheless.

After the initial set-up, the film introduces a pair of parallel yet eventually intersecting plots, about a clumsy doctoral candidate Steyn (Marius Weyers) and a newly transplanted young female grade school teacher Kate (Sandra Prinsloo), and a government opposing guerilla general (Louw Verwey), respectively. The superfluous stories slightly diminish the impact of the initial onslaught of brilliance but at least they give the characters something to do and had me giggling at the bumbling antics and silliness of the supposedly more sophisticated urbanites throughout.

Of particular note during the film’s collision of stories is a bout of man versus machine that pits an automotive clunker against the doctoral candidate as he attempts to drive a hundred miles through dessert, brush, hills, ponds, and various other rural impediments without the ability to properly idle. These episodes with Steyn desperately trying to make man’s modern inventions work for him rather than he for them are breathtaking in their simplicity and genius in execution. Add to that N!xau’s genuinely curious yet thoroughly cautious reactions to seeing much of man’s inventions for the first time (his exposure in the film to many modern things was also his first in his own life as well) and you’ve got a movie worthy of its substantial legend.

That South African director Jamie Uys and real-life San tribesman of the Kalahari Dessert, N!xau, never did anything of note following this epic comes as no surprise. A sequel or two or three were attempted, but as other reviewers note, by that point the passion and unique circumstances of the original were gone. No matter, The Gods Must Be Crazy is a special film and a prime example of a situation where all the right elements collide at precisely the right time and place yielding a perfectly strange cinematic experience that will occasionally be copied but certainly never duplicated.