Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan
Directed by Larry Charles
Twentieth-Century Fox

4 Stars

Sacha Baron Cohen’s new movie, “Borat: Cultural Learning of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan” has been unrepentantly marketed as a controversy.

Echoing the success by “The Da Vinci Code” producers to lure Catholic viewers by drawing attention to that film’s taboo themes, Cohen (star of HBO’s cult hit “Da Ali G Show,” and Class Day speaker at Harvard in 2004) and his backers at Fox have been focusing attention in their promotional materials on the protestations of the Kazakh government, and of Cohen’s hilarious replies. One recent television spot for the film explicitly refers to the news coverage of Borat, urging viewers to see what all the fuss is about.

The film, ostensibly a serious documentary about life in the United States commissioned by the Kazakh government, is nothing of the sort. In a mocking odyssey from his provincial hometown to New York City, and then across America, Borat interviews Americans of all walks of life, with gut-splittingly spectacular results.

With Kazakhstan, Cohen has found the perfect fall guy; a nation so unknown that no one in the Western world minds his jokes, and just stiff enough themselves that they respond to his satire with lawsuits and press releases, only further fueling Cohen’s hype machine.

Most of the Kazakhstan shots were actually filmed in Romania, and their verisimilitude (“cars” pulled by horses, rampant incest, extreme love of ping pong and sunbathing) is slim to none. Ironically enough given the extreme anti-Semitism of his character, Cohen’s “Kazakh” dialogue throughout the film is actually Hebrew.

Of course, every time the country responds seriously to these fabrications, Cohen issues a hysterical counterstatement and rakes in more free publicity. After a recent Kazakh advertising supplement in The New York Times designed to show the world how modern and business-friendly the nation really is, Borat responded with a statement blaming the campaign on neighboring Uzbekistan, and threatening a “catapult war” if it did not stop. Luckily for Fox, and unlike “Da Vinci,” Cohen’s film is worth the three-ring press circus; it’s one of the funniest and most savage investigations of American culture to ever be put on film.

Fans of the HBO show—where the Borat segments made their debut—will note a fair number of rehashed themes from the television sketches. Borat again learns formal etiquette and dines with a group of elite Southerners, and again spices up the dinner conversation with explicit talk of bowel movements.

He again sings the national anthem at a sports game; on the show it was a baseball game, here it’s a rodeo, and he actually sings a made-up Kazakh anthem to the tune of ours (one highlight: “Kazakhstan number one producer of potassium, other nations have inferior potassium”). These jokes are all still funny, but a satirist of Cohen’s skill could certainly have devised new tricks to play on Americans this time.

While hardcore Borat fans will inevitably be disappointed by the recycling job, the greatest surprise in “Borat” comes from Cohen’s new emphasis on crude slapstick humor. That’s not to say that the “Jackass”-style antics in the film (nude male wrestling, a live bear in an ice cream truck, the attempted abduction of Pamela Anderson) aren’t funny, just that it doesn’t take a comedic mind of Cohen’s caliber to decide that a fat naked man writhing around a bed might be funny.

Perhaps these segments are meant to spice up the narrative, and keep casual viewers happy; in any case, this “gonzo comedy” suits Fox (the film’s distributors) far more than Cohen’s old “Da Ali G Show” home HBO. Cohen’s real strength, here as always, is in using his deadpan portrayal of a totally oblivious foreigner to expose prejudice and hypocrisy in the supposedly civilized world.

The vast majority of the Americans that Borat meets, despite some fairly staggering failings, are polite almost to a fault (New York City pedestrians excepted). People indulge his nonsensical, offensive, and otherwise non sequitur comments, often responding to even the most ridiculous statements with a tactful “well, we really don’t do things like that over here.”

Director Larry Charles, a “Curb Your Enthusiasm” vet, knows how to work with this style of confrontational comedy (popular on shows now from “Curb” to “The Colbert Report”), milking awkward pauses and misunderstandings for all their comedic gold. The lengths Cohen goes to in the effort to actually offend people are staggering; his Southern dinner party doesn’t end until he orders an African-American hooker sent to the plantation house of his hosts.

More often, his subjects play along with startling nonchalance. When Borat asks which type of car he should buy to attract a girl with “a shave down below,” the dealer barely skips a beat before responding, “what you want is a Corvette.” This straight-talking instinct makes for good comedy, exposing the American id in all its potential hilarity, and brutality.

When Borat asks which firearm would be most suited for shooting a Jew, a gun salesman answers with similar assuredness, and points him towards an appropriate weapon. Another American urges Cohen to shave his mustache so that he looks less like “terrorist.” Upon hitching a ride from a caravan full of frat brothers, amid the generic male jostling, one youth takes the chance to gripe to Borat about how minorities are always “on top” in the United States. The shouts of support when he yells to a crowded stadium that he supports President Bush’s “war of terror” are real.

Borat himself is not immune from the racism and fear he exposes in Americans; his character is unrepentantly anti-Semitic, in a completely hyperbolic fashion. It’s apparent from the fictitious Kazakh “Running of the Jew” festival, and Borat’s terror at unknowingly accepting a room at a bed and breakfast run by a sweet old Orthodox Jewish couple, that he has no real idea what a “Jew” is.

In the latter, Borat and his producer think that the elderly Jews have turned themselves into cockroaches, and throw money at them desperately in an attempt to escape with their lives. The two German grad students next to me at the screening laughed a little less loudly at these jokes.

Cohen, who is Jewish, (his fiancée, “Wedding Crashers” star Isla Fisher, is converting for their upcoming wedding, as reported in The Evening Standard earlier this year) may easily escape allegations of anti-Semitism, but that alone doesn’t completely redeem his strategy. His thought process in “Borat” seems to be the following: if we present hyperbolic and laughable racism, viewers will see the absurdity underlying all harmful ethnic stereotypes.

The risk, however, is that by allowing Americans to contrast themselves to the virulent racism displayed by caricatured Kazakhstanis and ignorant Southern yokels, any attempt at meaningful self-examination will be discouraged.

The whole film reeks ever so slightly of this sort of bait and switch; the viewer, ignorant of how many Americans Borat interviewed before finding his tidbits of intolerance, is meant by implication to accept that his mockumentary is some sort of representative sample.

Without any frame of reference for his trip, it runs perilously close to yet another “look, those racist middle Americans are crazy!” Given the imminent success of this film, coastal and European elites might just project the critique of American culture onto an imagined other, failing to realize that they are implicated in the whole endeavor.

What Borat wants from America—a big car, a roadtrip to California, lessons in how to be cool from black youth, Pamela Anderson—are all distilled essences of shared American dreams.

In enacting these material fantasies, Cohen isn’t playing Borat as ignorant of America; indeed, these are the American exports famous the world over. If anything, Borat has received the messages our culture has sent all too well, a more sophisticated point that hides beneath the surface-level farce.

Of course, without cheap shots, there would be no Borat. Could Cohen get away with blatantly mocking many other nations? His gay Austrian character on “Da Ali G Show,” Bruno, is a ridiculous, hyper-flamboyant character, but he isn’t an indictment of all of Austria, just as Ali G and his “Staines massive” gang don’t represent the entirety of England.

Maybe Kazakhstan, bolstered by a wave of post-adolescent U. S. tourism to beautiful downtown Almaty in search of Borat and his ilk, will come to realize that there’s no such thing as bad publicity.

In any case, after the amount of press he’s been given in the run-up to this film release, Cohen can’t expect many more credulous interview subjects for Borat. With homosexuality such a fiery political issue lately, perhaps a “Funkyzeit mit Brüno” movie lurks over the horizon? We can only hope.

Bottom Line: Maybe too much “hram” comedy, but I think film is nice…you like!

—Reviewer Will B. Payne can be reached at payne@fas.harvard.edu.