Borat

I saw BORAT a month ago at one of those secret myspace screenings. Wouldn’t have gotten in, except for the fact that the myspace folks decided there were sufficient resources to fofer a second screening, and that took care of the rest of us.

I wanted to love the movie, and while I like and respect it, I don’t adore it. To some degree, this is not the movie’s fault. The funniest sequence in the whole film, by far, was already shown at Comicon, and I was hoping everything else would be at that level. It isn’t.

Also, a significant portion of the humor in BORAT involves public defecation and naked fat people, not to mention the response of a surprised public to same. But JACKASS NUMBER TWO goes so much further in both directions that it has rather defused the shock and the joke. And Cohen’s been doing the talk show rounds, as Borat, delivering many of the same lines from the movie over and over.

I doubt I need to explain the plot or the set-up much — Borat is the alter-ego of Sacha Baron Cohen, and as an alleged reporter from Kazakhstan, he basically does a Candid Camera routine that tests the limits of how much his interview subjects will tolerate from someone whom they believe is from another culture. At his best, Borat does what comedy in the most classical sense was designed to do, holding a mirror up to common human foibles that we may laugh at them.

In the “U.S. and A” this often leads to him exhibiting openly anti-Semitic, homophobic, or sexist thoughts, which generally either provokes an overly shocked reaction or a shocking co-conspiratorial one, as when a Texan at a rodeo tells him he’d like to see homosexuals hanged. At a dinner party in the South, Borat’s behavior is ridiculous, disgusting (he hands the hostess a bag of what is ostensibly his own shit, which leads to one of the funniest end credits ever…”Feces provider for Mr. Baron Cohen.” Put that on the ol’ resume!), but none of it gets him kicked out of the house until he invites a black woman over to join them.

Cohen and his costar Ken Davitian (who also appeared in FROGTOWN II alongside Douglas Dunning) exhibit an aboslute fearlessness and the strongest commitment to character I’ve ever seen. They do things here that must have gotten them in trouble with the law at some point, but character was not broken even then. I’d nominate both for Oscars.

Still, I’m left a little mixed on the “moviefilm” itself. It has great moments, but the scripted aspect of the story, which has Borat travelling cross country to propose to Pamela Anderson, isn’t its strongest suit — it’s hard to feel any empathy for a character whom we know full well is a complete put-on, and hard to relate to his journey in any way otherwise, though most of the incidental skits along the way are funny. Perhaps, like Jackass, it might have been better to dispense with plot altogether. Dispensing with the reality aspect wouldn’t likely have worked — Baron Cohen tried that before with ALI G INDAHOUSE, which failed to find a theatrical release here, though it was a hit in England.

What I like and respect the most is the way this movie is likely to be a daisy cutter bomb in teh cultural wars — folks on the right, especially out here, like to pretend that racism and bigotry is a thing of the past, no longer a problem, and certainly not anything they’d have anything to do with, because of course it’s liberals who are intolerant. But extreme prejudices are very much alive still, and the way Borat exposes some of them is very well done. I don’t think everyone’s as awful as they’re made out to be — some people are clearly being polite and humoring a few of Borat’s more outrageous remarks. But then there are those who take the ball and run with it, and leave you just a little more disappointed in humanity than you might otherwise have been.

This isn’t the funniest movie of the decade, or even the year (I rate JACKASS NUMBER TWO above it for sheer laughs). But it is one of the more daring and experimental features I’ve seen from a major studio.