Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
1/11/07
When it comes to the people
around us, just about everybody belongs to one of two groups: those
who look for reasons to like them, and those who look for reasons to dislike
them. Maybe that's why I have such conflicted feelings about the
exhaustively titled Borat; Cultural Learnings of America for Make
Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (let's call it Borat from
now on...). On the one hand, it's the most hysterically crude laugh
riot since South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut. On
the other, it's a dark-hearted, mean-spirited exercise that left me feeling
depressed by the cold cynicism of its' filmmakers, who're pretty certain
they can tell you everything there is to hate about someone in a few minutes
of film.
The film is ostensibly a
documentary created by Kazakh TV personality Borat Sagdivev (Sacha Baron
Cohen) and his producer/cameraman Azamat Bagatov (Ken Devitian) to educate
the proudly racist, homophobic and misogynistic people of backwards Kazakhstan
on the ways of the Greatest Country in the World, the (as Borat calls it)
U.S. and A. Borat arrives in New York City and begins interviewing
politicians and experts on all things American until a chance spin around
the TV dial in his hotel room leads to his first-ever look at Baywatch.
He persuades Azamat that there's a better documentary to be made of a cross-country
trip to California, but his real goal is to find and marry his new love,
Pamela Anderson.
Of course, any plot synopsis
of Borat is beside the point. This story, for better or worse, is
a thin clothesline upon which to hang the post-modern Candid Camera
routine Cohen perfected on TV's Da Ali G Show. Again and again,
we see Borat say the most unspeakable things imaginable to people, trying
to get them to react in a way that will prove the movie's point (as stated
repeatedly in the press by the filmmakers and their admirers): behind
America's polite, integrated facade lies a nation awash in unspoken bigotry.
Sometimes, it works. What one Rodeo Cowboy is willing to say on camera
really shocked me, and some drunken frat boys who make the mistake of being
nice to Borat display an amazingly stone-aged view of women. More
often, the results are debatable: is a car salesman providing a requested
estimate of how fast you'd have to drive to hit and kill a gypsy an anti-gypsy
racist or merely showing how much our “customer is always right” retail
culture programs us to accept anything we hear in order to make the sale?
At his worst, Cohen/Borat piles on offense after offense until anyone would
throw him out on his ear, just so he can turn around and say “See, the
only reason you threw me out of your dinner party was because the hooker
I brought was black!” At moments like this, I couldn't help
but wonder how anyone could find it so hard to find casual racism in the
United States.
Part of the problem is the
loaded deck the filmmakers deal from. Perhaps because the release
people were required to sign pretty clearly stated that the people they
were talking to were misrepresenting who they were, just about everyone
Borat meets in his journey happens to be either elderly or drunk.
In some cases, as with a Christian revival meeting Borat attends late in
the film, file footage of other religious leaders making outrageous statements
is edited in to make it seem as though people who themselves do nothing
wrong on camera endorsed it. Again and again, I found myself wondering
how much of what is shown was the whole story. Watching the slow
burn of an antique shop's owners after Borat trashed their stuff and can't
afford to pay for the broken items is only funny if, after the scene wrapped,
the filmmakers turned around and made good for the damage. If they
simply hopped into a van and drove away counting the millions the movie
would make at the dealers expense, that's not quite so hilarious.
Context is everything where this kind of humor is concerned, and you'll
find very little of it with which to judge Borat (at least outside
of the court papers filed by the half-dozen or so people who've sued over
the way their footage was used).
What keeps Borat from
being an utter waste of time is that the movie does stop harassing innocent
passers-by often enough to let loose some truly inspired sequences, most
revolving around the backwards ideas Borat's brought with him from (mercifully
fictionalized) Kazakhstan. In particular, the much-discussed Running
of the Jew sequence and a stopover at a Bed and Breakfast whose kindly
Jewish owners are believed by Borat to be shape-shifting demons are brilliant
skewings of Anti-Semitism. A running joke about a Kazakh “scientist”
who's proven that women's brains are smaller than men's also pays off repeatedly.
And to be fair, some of the Man on the Street stuff is pretty funny.
Highlights include an utterly unflappable driving instructor and a Humor
Coach who tries in vain to explain to his new student why “we try to stay
away from” jokes about mental retardation. And Borat's climactic
meeting with Pamela Anderson, while obviously staged, does have some big
laughs.
It all comes back to the
old joke about how “we're not laughing at you, we're laughing with you.”
Borat's
not laughing with anybody, and for a movie determined to unmask hatred
and discrimination, it comes across as a pretty hateful enterprise itself.
Yes, I did laugh, but I hated myself in the morning. |
