Culture Clubbed
You laugh this movie-film? Nice! (Film Review)
by Michael Sean McGowan
The Upside: Guilty pleasure comedy.
The Downside: Don't try to read too much into it.
When a movie has a title like Borat: Cultural Learnings of American for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, you know you're going to get something out of it, even if it is at minimum a decent chuckle over the jaw-breaking, hit-em-over-the-head nomenclature. This is a crazy little movie, part elongated sketch show based on a character created by British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen on Da Ali G Show, part scatter-shot satire at nothing in particular, just whatever (or whoever) happens to step in front of its crosshairs.
The character of Borat Sagdiyev is supposedly a celebrity figure in his native Kazakhstan (unlike most of his neighbors, he can actually afford a clock radio!), a television journalist who is sent by the Kazakhstan Ministry of Information to America to discover- I don't know, I guess why Americans are so American. Borat has not been living in obscurity- he's been an HBO mainstay for a few years and Cohen's sketches have produced plenty of ill-tempered outrage from the real nation of Kazakhstan, who have a problem with their nation being portrayed as a gaggle of Deliverance-inspired rubes who lock their women in cages and every year hold a national event called "The Running of the Jew."
Borat, the character and the movie, gets away with a lot because it's what has often been described as an "equal opportunity offender." In the nature of comedy there must lie the heart of irony that the best way to justify ridiculing any particular race, religion, or disability, is to make fun of every race, religion, and disability, and Borat's proficiency at both this and taking broken english lewdness to new levels is intoxicating. Almost hallmark in his anti-Semitism, at one point Borat finds himself "trapped" at a bed and breakfast run by a kindly Jewish couple. The over-the-top moxie shrewdness of this moment is not just in how director Larry Charles turns this into probably the greatest Blair Witch Project send-up ever made, but also in how Borat's bigotry is equally full-force and strangely without malice. When Borat arrives off the plane in New York City in a suit that's never been washed (true fact- look it up) to film a documentary on our country, his complete arsenal of abusive views on everyone from Jews to women to rednecks is less an instrument of hate than a byproduct of a society, as fictionalized as it might be, that hasn't yet figured out that toilet water should never serve dual functions.
The reason why Borat makes us laugh (and it does- you might be doing so with your hands over your eyes or while squirming in your seat, but it does) is that the postage-stamp narrow view of its "hero" is the joke- we're laughing at Borat, not with him, even as he brings on the vapors to a genteel Southern dinner party by bringing a prostitute as his date or vainly tries to buy "gypsy tears" from a suburban garage sale. Originally on a project to bring American "learnings" to his home country, Borat gets swept off his feet and on the road to California after watching an episode of Baywatch and becoming obsessed with She of the Teflon Body Parts, Pamela Anderson (best part about this- his equally divine and deluded conviction that his dear "Pamel" is a virgin). Along the way of his journey to take the lithesome lifeguard as his bride, Borat tunnels though a sub-section of the American people that's not really all that random (a rodeo, a Civil War memorabilia shop- see a pattern?). The gimmick of Borat is the illusion that almost no one he encounters knows they're in on the joke, like the audience of that rodeo who applaud wildly when Borat appears in an American flag shirt and praises "your war of terror," then get more and more unsettled as his litany follows the natural progression from jingoistic to vitriolic. It's difficult, though, to believe that Borat's antics are completely unscripted, since quite a few of them could and should have landed Cohen significant jail time.
What's lost on me is something advance (and overly enthusiastic) press has been obsessing about- a so-called "social critique" laid beneath Borat's endless double and triple-entendres, the idea that Borat's blind-faith bigotry acts as a revealing lightning rod for our own, that when he interacts, for example, with a group of road-trip frat boys, his simple-mindedness dredges their own intolerance to the surface as they whine to him about what a pain it is to live in a country where minorities have rights and women aren't subservient to men. It's an interesting trick, and it does yield some fruit (Borat gets the rodeo coordinator to display an almost frightening racist and homophobic side), but this is not the point of Borat- it's hardly even an active hobby. Make no mistake- Borat is comedy in an Andy Kaufman tradition, and Borat's unpredictability and misbehaving mouth are the dynamite tossed into the lake. It's our job to just cover our heads and count the dead fish that float to the surface. Don't mistake what is essentially a ninety-minute cousin to Crank Yankers with anything of any revealing social import, particularly when the kind of intolerance it finds is put on evidence every fifteen minutes in venues of the likes of Rush Limbaugh. And as evidenced by just about every Saturday Night Life spin-off movie ever made, characters designed for sketch comedy rarely have a shelf-life tolerable for a feature film. Borat fairs better than most if because Cohen, who played a smarmy Frenchman just a notch above most smarmy Frenchmen in Talladega Nights, keeps the barbs varied (but consistently R-rated). But by the end the welcome's worn a little thin.
Borat isn't important or innocent, and it certainly isn't nice, but this is its gimmick, its strength. No one ever said comedy has to leave us feeling good about ourselves, and Borat's hilarity comes precisely from its fake repulsiveness, getting us to laugh in the face of things we'd normally turn away from. B
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