Larry Charles: Borat (2006)

[Chris Knipp]

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan

A cutting edge that's kind of blunt

Borat is a film-length foray into character-driven shock humor. From reports, in real life there's something quite harmless and sweet about its star, Shasha Baron Cohen, a tall, thin Jewish comic from England who adopts satiric personas. But once behind one of his masks, he acquires enormous chutzpah. As Borat, Cohen becomes a mustashioed, in-your-face TV reporter from Kazakhstan who naively and freely pursues pornography and sex and indulges his taste for scatological humor and his sexism, homophobia and anti-Semitism. Needless to say, Sasha Baron Cohen doesn’t share these ideas and tendencies. He's an Oxbridge history man who did graduate work on Jewish involvement in the American civil rights movement. In this movie, Borat goes to America with a fat aide (Ken Davitian), and presumably a cameraman, and has a series of filmed meetings with locals.

What’s additionally of note -- and this is essential to Cohen's working method as a comic --is that these sequences involve real people in actual situations who've agreed to appear on camera but are unaware they’re being used as the butt of a joke. Many of them are good humored or clueless about being duped but some are not. Strangers on the New York subway repel “Borat’s” efforts to kiss them on both cheeks and a group of polite diners disburse rapidly when he brings a black prostitute to the table uninvited. But Borat shows that in today’s America a bigot with weird manners can seduce you at first if he has a tidy mustache, glib smile and pleasant appearance. Revivalist Christians speaking in tongues welcome him, and so do some drunken frat boys, who agree they want to wipe out all homosexuals too. At times his feigned bigotry brings out the bigotry of others.

Cohen’s Borat is a boor-naïf, probably the only kind of boor such a basically gentle comic could assimilate. The mean, knowing ones are more dangerous. Cohen lacks the 'savage indignation" of a powerful satirist like Swift. But what Cohen is getting at is the danger of apathy and passive ignorance – the way a person without an awareness of malicious intent can do harm by being a conduit for bigotry, or just looking the other way. He's said in an <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/news/coverstory/sacha_baron_cohen_the_real_borat_finally_speaks/page/">interview</a> that he's fascinated, if horrified, by the idea that “the path to Auschwitz was paved with indifference.”

The path to Borat the film is paved with the best of intentions, and to judge by the extremely positive critical reaction to his (and Larry Charles's) movie from public and critics alike, those intentions have been well received. But though Cohen may be sensitive, intelligent, and sophisticated, his humor is crude, made up of things like talking about excretion at the dinner table; soul-kissing a woman who he then announces is his sister and the best prostitute in town. The way homophobes and Jew-haters are made fun of makes you wonder if anybody intelligent enough to watch this movie and grasp its ulterior motive -- to agitate for compassion – needs these messages. Along with the laughs comes an easy self-satisfaction. Does this take us anywhere? And Cohen's depiction of Borat's home village in Kazakhstan is heavy with its own bigotry and condescension.

Borat falls in love with sex goddess Pamela Anderson when he sees her on an old Bay Watch episode and he forces his crew to go to California. When he strikes out with Pamela after trying to put a Kazak “marriage bag” over her head at a celebrity autograph session somewhere – another real event, which puts Pamela to flight and gets him in trouble – he realizes he should stick with the only person who seemed to have real tenderness. He takes back the black prostitute to be his wife in Kazakhstan.

How does Kazakhstan feel about all this? Unless the New York Times and other big media are victims of another one of Cohen’s hoaxes, a top Kazakhstan official has just <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/6168848.stm">declared</a> the country indebted to the movie: "any publicity is good publicity," he's said, inviting Cohen to visit his country (to which the comic has never been). Ultimately the movie, though widely celebrated as “hysterically funny,” isn’t very smart. It's bold, and numerous lawsuits against the filmmakers by their previously willing dupes are a tribute to that; but its "originality" is restricted to saying the unmentionable, like a pubescent boy trying to impress his buddies, or all the post-pubescent boys who enjoy Jackass or Ashton Kutcher’s “Punk’d” or the National Lampoon. The whole idea goes back forty years or so to "Candid Camera." Maybe the reason why Borat has been so well reviewed is that this isn’t a stellar cinematic year. The critics are just a bit desperate. But the peculiar circumstances of Cohen’s and Charles’s filmmaking are something one would like to know more about. It appears they’re making fun of the naivety of Americans, not just of bigots, but his working method simply takes advantage of how polite people are – especially when then know they’re being filmed.

[oscar jubis]

Borat qualifies as a phenomenon, a relatively low-budget movie that has surpassed $120 million at the US box office and $100 million in the early stages of worldwide distribution (which reportedly won't include Russia). It also qualifies as a phenomenon in the sense that Borat is the rare film being embraced by both the low-brow and high-brow segments of the film audience.

Borat is supremely engaging and funny. At a purely experiential level, one cannot underestimate or underappreciate this. I watched Borat on a weekday afternoon with an audience characterized by a wide age-range. The people were laughing, cracking up, howling and hissing through the duration. I can't come up with another title that inspired such consistently intense reactions. The protagonist is a masterful creation by the very talented Sasha Baron Cohen, whose ability to keep a straight face during some scenes is admirable in itself. The performance was rewarded today with a well-deserved Golden Globe nomination.

A lot of the material is crass and crude (it doesn't get more so than public pooping and nude wrestling). Some of it is rather silly (scenes involving a bear inside a trailer, for instance). But Borat's trip from his rural village to the "greatest nation in the world" (the one ruled by the "mighty warlord Bush") is meant to illustrate certain socio-political viewpoints one is compelled to regard with seriousness. Many scenes, mostly set in "red States", involve unsuspecting interview subjects almost eager, given half a chance, to display their racism, misogyny and outright hatred of others. Borat aims to learn something from America to "make benefit" his "glorious nation", but he finds that all the riches and technology of the first world don't produce people who are happier, or more ethical, or more moral, or culturally advanced than the folks from his rural village in the developing world. Underlying messages like these, not the crass albeit funny antics, make Borat a truly audacious film.

[Chris Knipp]

Well, this is one "high-brow" who doesn't embrace it.

Cohen is a truly audacious person; Borat is not a truly audacious film. It is a phenomenon; you got that right. But to some extent your remarks indicate you may have seen the film you wanted to see. I don't agree on all the credit you give it, simply because you heard a lot of people laughing and thought it brought up some issues. I personally laughed out loud only once--I forget when it was.

I think the reviewer on the pungently and approprately titled website Cinema de Merde makes some good specific points about Borat's pluses and minuses that supplement mine. It may appear I dwelt on the minuses. I do grant Cohen a notable and effective schtick, which he wields with panache.

He[Cohen] does get some good material. He asks a used car salesman for a car that will attract a woman with a shaved pussy, and the guy responds, without [missing] a beat, “Oh, that’d be a Corvette or Hummer.” He asks a gun salesman which would be the best gun to shoot a Jew with, and the guy casually says “Well probably a 9mm.” Probably the biggest hotbed of prejudice in the movie would be the rodeo he goes to in the south, where the representative tells him to “Shave that danggun mustache. I see one of those guys [a Middle Easterner] and I wonder what kind of bomb he’s got.” He also describes gays as “people who walk around like this,” as he flutters his fingers. Borat says that they hang homosexuals in his county, and the guy responds “well that’s what we’re trying to do here.” Later in the film he encounters three drunk frat boys who say it’s a “shame that women are not slaves,” finally emphatically advising him “Do not let a woman ever, EVER, make you who you are!”

Unfortunately that is most, or at least half, of similar content in the movie. The rest is people being shocked at dinner parties, feminists getting insulted, courtesy coaches being patient, random people being shocked by Borat running around naked—yeah, it’s funny, but so was Candid Camera, and that came on 30 years ago.

So yeah, it’s a case of my expectations being high, but it just strikes me as a shame. This could have been a great and important film about the hypocrisies of the U.S. and the buried hatred and prejudices that we conceal under our smiles and professions of acceptance. Instead it’s a rather forgettable outrageous comedy. It is outrageous, and it is hilarious, but, to me at least, it’s too bad it had to be quite so forgettable.

It's also a shame that such buffoonery now passes for cutting edge satire. When it comes to wit, we live in debased and desperate times.

[oscar jubis]

Can't a movie be both "ourageous comedy" and "an important film about the hypocrisies of the U.S. and the buried hatred and prejudices that we conceal"? Read my comment and see how I acknowledge that "a lot of the material is crass and crude" and "some of it is rather silly". What makes Borat such an odd bird is that the film is also a sharp socio-political satire with very though-provoking subtext.

I can't argue with your not finding the film funny. It's your experience and I accept it. But I know I found it funny and I know that I've never heard so much laughing, howling and hissing inside a movie theatre. I also can't find any basis for your comment that "the critics are just a bit desperate". You make it sound like all these critics who've made Borat the second best reviewed movie of the year (according to Metacritic) got together and conspired to select a movie to hail because "this isn't a stellar cinematic year".

[Chris Knipp]

Can't a movie be both "ourageous comedy" and "an important film about the hypocrisies of the U.S. and the buried hatred and prejudices that we conceal"?

Of course it can. I'm just not convinced it's the way you say it is. This is not a calculated and thoughtful film. It's all improvised, and it's wildly inconsistent. Borat isn't a thoroughly conceived character. He's got no substance. He's not even a solid bourgeois. He's just a TV personality, even in his persona. And as the quote from Cinema de Merde points out, some of the scenes bring out serious prejudices, but a lot of them are just people being startled at a guy acting silly. Going up to men on the sidewalk of New York and trying to shake their hand and kiss them on both cheeks and say hello isn't a satire of anything, it's just acting silly and trying to get a startled reaction out of people, and he does a lot of that. The courtesy coach in the south, the dining-out folks, are not hiding any dark prejudices, just normal bourgeois reservations about behavior, which they're at pains to conceal as long as they can because they're trying to be polite. This is not a devastating expose of buried hatred. Furthermore, these prejudices and hatreds are not buried and concealed. They're right out in the open every day on the radio and in the papers. There are no revelations in the movie. It's surprises are obvious. They're embarrassing because those who expose them didn't mean to, but they're not anything revelatory. Why did your audience (not mine--it wasn't a full theater, and people chuckled for a while at the start and then it died down) hiss and roar all through and after? Because it's shock comedy and it touches nerves, and it feels new--to them. Probably not to the audiences of Moms Mably in the Seventies. It's not as new as it may look. Nothing new under the sun, my friend.

I may be wrong about the critics. What do I know about them? But if you reviewed the data it might even turn out that Metacritc has slanted it, and Borat isn't in the top two after all. Metacritic often does slant their numerical values of reviews too far in one direction or the other. About 30 new movies are coming out between now and the end of the year. Maybe some of them will be great. But it looks to me right now like this hasn't been such a good year, and what has been good hasn't been earth-shakingly original. The critics may have heralded Borat because it seems like something new. JI grant that it does; despite its identifiable origins Cohen's method has created a somewhat new genre. Jackass Meets Punk'd meets Michael Moore. Hey, that's new! So let's give them a rave! But I'm not impressed. I'm disappointed. As was Cinema de Merde.

[tabuno]

This was the only 2006 movie that I really, really wanted to walk out of because personally I found the movie almost unwatchable. The production was crude, the storyline thin, the acting and real life performances truly horrendously pitifully sad and tasteless. If any producer or director wanted to really create a great docu-mockery, this wasn't it. Jamie Kennedy Experiment was far superior and even the late night Women Behaving Badly on television provide a more entertaining funny real life expose. Borat qualifies as easily the worst movie of the year and one that duped most of its audience with tasteless material.

[Chris Knipp]

I'm glad somebody agrees with me that this movie is overrated. Worst of the year -- I don't know; I have tried to stay away from the obviously bad ones. That's why I focus on the "Most Overrated" category in my annual list-making rather than on "Worst." I'd hate to have to go see the obvisous turkeys, but I had to go to Borat because of all the hype.