Foreign Threat

What makes Borat dangerous is also what makes it great.

by Sam Adams

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America is under attack. Not by some shadowy group of extremists, but at the hairy-knuckled hands of a gangly TV reporter from Kazakhstan. Making his way across the country in a battered ice cream truck even more run-down than Little Miss Sunshine's spent VW bus, Borat Sagdiyev makes his way into the American heartland and finds it teeming with credulous, patronizing airheads who wink at bigotry and plainly consider foreigners a step above insects on the evolutionary chain. Worse still, he makes us laugh at it.

Borat, an alter ego of the British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen (best known, at least until now, as Ali G), is a xenophobe's nightmare, a foul, uncouth repository of unacceptable attitudes intent on absconding with our precious natural resources — at least if you count Pamela Anderson among them. But his sheer inappropriateness is his secret weapon. By staking out the far end of every possible spectrum, he makes anything less than total insanity seem reasonable by comparison. His unsuspecting interview subjects don't know what hit them, and neither will some audiences.

Fox is selling Borat, whose Fiona Apple-esque subtitle is Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, as a comedy, and so it is. But it's also the most outlandish studio-funded conceptual prank since Gus Van Sant's Psycho, a nonstop mindfuck that turns the documentary form, not to mention traditional setup-punch line comedy, inside out. It's often impossible to tell what's real and what's staged, especially since the movie aggressively undermines accepted notions of what Americans will and won't say and do. Time and again, Cohen unleashes a pernicious howler you're sure will be met with socially scripted outrage, but what comes back is acceptance or even amplification. Borat's mirror may be warped, but the reflection comes out true.

Borat is held together by a staged frame story in which he and the obese, short-tempered Azamat Bagatov (Ken Davitian) are sent Stateside to gather "learnings" for their fledgling nation. But the movie's heart and (tarnished) soul are the on-the-road documentary segments in which Borat functions as a heat-damaged de Tocqueville, poised somewhere between Charles Kuralt and Andy Kaufman. Cohen's Borat is as dumb as a rock and scarcely more graceful, but his subjects (better to call them prey) underestimate him at their peril. Repeat viewings reveal Cohen as a brilliantly canny improviser with a knack for drawing out the worst in people. When a rodeo manager in Salem, Va., recoils from Borat's sloppy cheek kiss, Cohen goes in for the kill, volunteering with a conspiratorial wink that in his country, men who kiss men are locked up, "and then we finish them." The manager leaps for the bait as if he can't wait to drop his mask. "Hang 'em," he says with back-slapping enthusiasm. "That's what we're trying to do here."

The results are even more astonishing when Borat steps into the ring to sing the national anthem. Wrapped in an Old Glory shirt and cowboy hat, he fires up the crowd with jingoist bromides that quickly morph into an absurdist, and unobserved, parody of right-wing red meat. "We support your war of terror!" he yells. "May George W. Bush drink the blood of every man, woman and child in Iraq!" The crowd roars right back at him. It's only when he suggests bombing the country until "not even a single lizard is left alive" that the applause starts to die down.

In essence, Borat is the decoy and Cohen the hunter, shooting down suckers lulled into complacency by his creation's dopey inappropriateness. At times, he merely exploits the fact that people will do anything to avoid looking stupid in front of a camera crew (which, of course, just ends up making them look stupider). In the movie's most mortifying extended sequence, Borat sits down to dinner with a hoity-toity Alabama "dining society" whose members barely bat an eye as Cohen blithely insults them. It's hard to tell where hospitality ends and condescension begins. Do they actually imagine they don't have bathrooms in Kazakhstan?

Cohen lands bigger fish when he uses bigger bait, never more so than when he's indulging Borat's outsize bigotry. A gun salesman barely blinks when Borat asks for the "best gun to defend from Jew," and a Hummer dealer happily suggests the optimum speed to run down gypsies without cracking the windshield. The movie's heart of darkness is a westbound RV full of drunken University of South Carolina frat brothers who unleash a torrent of privileged resentments culminating in the conclusion that the country would be "better off" if slavery were reinstated.

STAR-STRANGLED BANNER: Borat (Sacha Baron Cohen) mangles the national anthem at a Salem, Va., rodeo.

Of course, getting drunken jackasses to shoot their mouths off is not exactly Pulitzer material. If there's a nagging hangover to Borat's comic highs, it's the sense that Cohen's charade wouldn't work without the credulous good will of his subjects. Those who catch on, like the humorless first-wave feminists who walk out on the interview after Borat calls one "pussycat," may be right in labeling him a clown, but they still come off as spoilsports. There's a fine line between mocking powerless individuals and taking on the culture at large, and Borat is on both sides of it.

That it's stupendously funny only makes it more troubling. When Cohen and director Larry Charles stage a mock Kazakh ritual called "The Running of the Jew," complete with detailed blood-libel references, you can't blame those who wonder if everyone is laughing for the right reasons. I've seen the movie with radically different audiences, and I'm not sure if I'm more troubled by the art-film buffs who seemed to miss the joke or the rabid Borat fans who howled at every line. (It's worth pointing out that Cohen is himself Jewish, and the language in which Borat speaks to Azamat is not Kazakh but Hebrew — an in-joke that, according to one blogger, had a festival audience in Haifa doubling over with laughter.)

But what makes Borat troubling is also what makes it great — not to mention more subversive and dangerous than most people realize. As much as Borat leads his victims to the slaughter, he sugar-coats the bitterest pills, serving up equal portions of social critique and lowbrow comedy (including a nude wrestling match that has to be seen to be disbelieved). The character illustrates the extent to which people will go along with anything if it can be made to seem socially acceptable, and every theater full of laughing audiences proves the point. The ultimate butt of the movie's pranks isn't on the screen, but sitting in front of it.

(sam@citypaper.net)

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

Directed by Larry CharlesA 20th Century Fox releaseOpens Friday at area theaters