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

UPDATE: I saw Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan at the beginning of this year at a focus group screening. The film, then simply titled Borat, seemed finished at the time and it was truly hilarious. The audience reaction was overwhelmingly positive. I had no idea then the kind of marketing push Borat was going to receive throughout the year. Cohen has been everywhere promoting it, and the character is far more visible to the general public now than when I first saw the movie. I'm anxious to see what mass audiences will think of Cohen's outrageous antics.

David Poland has already suggested that he should be nominated for Best Actor, and it's certainly an immersive performance. The problem is, Borat's not realistic. He's very funny, but more a collection of silly, small-minded cliches about Eastern European barbarism than a three-dimensional character. What makes the film kind of disturbing as well as funny is that the Americans he meets on his travels are so willing to believe in such an egregious "foreign guy" stereotype, and tend to agree with his ludicrous, comical ideas about the world. Radar Online this week called it "a tragic comedy," which feels appropriate.

Anyway, here's the review, originally published on February 2nd of this year.

When you get right down to it, there's nothing all that original about Sacha Baron Cohen's schtick. He gets into an outlandish character, goes out on the street and films improvised "bits" in which he messes with ordinary people. Everyone from Tom Green to the Upright Citizens Brigade to the dudes from "Jackass" have done this routine before, with a variety of results. What's innovative is not the man's concept but his intuitive sense for the Mind of the Simpleton.

Cohen understands stupid people. He knows how to relate to idiots on their level, how to keep morons talking long enough to tease out the misguided core beliefs they usually keep to themselves. And he seems to know exactly how far he can push the gullible before they'll finally catch on to the joke. It's this mastery of interpersonal communication and brilliant improvisational skill that elevates Cohen's material from the level of funny, if sophomoric, pranks and into what can only be considered a kind of performance art.

Cohen's new film, Borat, in which he portrays a clueless Kazakh making a documentary to send home about America, finds the comedian at the top of his game. His cross-country trek from New York to Los Angeles, inspired by the vision of Pamela Anderson starring as C.J. on "Baywatch," contains as much insight into the American character as anything Ken Burns has yet produced. And it's a lot more funny than listening to Keith David tell you about the origins of the Designated Hitter Rule.

I was among the first to see Borat, at an advanced screening tonight in Marina del Rey, and the reaction was highly positive. It might be early to start declaring Best Films of 2006, but Borat will absolutely rank with the most amusing. (UPDATE #2: It's absolutely still the best film I have seen all year.)



Borat mixes a few scenes of scripted material, telling the story of Borat's trip to America to make a documentary, with actual footage of Cohen screwing with Americans. The plot is unimportant...Borat and his producer Azamat (there is no IMDB listing yet, so I don't know the actor's name, but he's great Kenneth Davitian) initially mean to film for a few weeks in New York. But after Borat sees an episode of "Baywatch" in his hotel room, he decides he must travel across the coutnry to Los Angeles to make the series' beautiful star, Pamela Anderson, his wife.

The result is a lot like a 90 minute Borat segment from HBO's "Da Ali G Show." Some of the highlights include an exclusive dinner party in which Borat learns proper bathroom etiquette, a road trip in an RV with some drunken frat boy assholes, Borat nearly starting a riot after singing a mutilated version of the National Anthem at a rodeo and a lovely stay at a Bed & Breakfast run by an elderly Jewish couple.

As on the show, Cohen uses Borat mainly to demonstrate the condescending attitudes and the intolerance that have come to define America for so many people from other nations. The comedy is often based around making his victims feel awkward and uncomfortable, but the joke is not so much the pure shock value of Borat's outrageous behavior as it is the hypocracy, xenophobia, paranoia and blind ignorance that his behavior sparks in others.

That's not to say the film is not occasionally shocking, outrageous and over-the-top. Thus far, it's unrated, but the cut I saw tonight could only receive an R rating, if not a full-blown NC-17.

UPDATE #3: The film will be R-rated. One bit that I saw within the film, Borat starring in a pornographic film, has appeared on the Internet as a "deleted scene," so I assume some of the more offensive material and explicit nudity has most likely been removed. It will probably all be back on the DVD).

Borat's worldview is highly sexualized. He's not above, for example, suggesting that a young man lure a small mammal into his penis hole using a piece of cheese or inviting a news anchor on the air to come to Kazahkstan and make love to his prostitute sister.

Director Larry Charles (who was brought in at the production's halfway point to replace Todd Phillips, who cowardly walked off the project) has done a pretty decent job of tying together all the various real-world bits into the semblance of a story. The film feels organized and well-paced even though it's really just a collection of independent pranks and set pieces that hang together only by the common presence of Borat. (Most of the actual tying-together is done in simple voice-over that's rarely funny but mercifully brief).

Borat:CLAMBGNK is a major improvement from Cohen's last attempt to bring a character to the big screen, the slack Ali G Indahouse. That film tried to turn Cohen's dopey interviewer Ali G into a fictional leading man, and the result was disasterous. This film understands that Borat works as a vehicle for getting hilarious interviews and applies his abilities accordingly. Some of the brief fictional sequences are funny, because of the hapless likability of the Borat character and Cohen's skills as a comedian, but they pale in comparison to the confrontational documentary-style footage. I'll be seeing it again, probably more than once, after it finally comes to theaters on November 3rd.