A cutting edge that's pretty soft

Rating: 7/10 (14 December 2006)

Borat is a film-length foray into character-driven shock humor. From reports, in real life there's something quite harmless and sweet about its star, Shasha Baron Cohen, a tall, thin Jewish comic from England who adopts satiric personas. But once behind one of his masks, he acquires enormous chutzpah. As Borat, Cohen becomes a mustachioed, in-your-face TV reporter from Kazakhstan who naively and freely pursues pornography and sex and indulges his taste for scatological humor and his sexism, homophobia and anti-Semitism. Needless to say, Sasha Baron Cohen doesn't share these ideas and tendencies. He's an Oxbridge history man who did graduate work on Jewish involvement in the American civil rights movement. In this movie, Borat goes to America with a fat aide (Ken Davitian), and presumably a cameraman, and has a series of filmed meetings with locals.
What's additionally of note -- and this is essential to Cohen's working method as a comic --is that these sequences involve real people in actual situations who've agreed to appear on camera but are unaware they're being used as the butt of a joke. Many of them are good humored or clueless about being duped but some are not. Strangers on the New York subway repel "Borat's" efforts to kiss them on both cheeks and a group of polite diners disburse rapidly when he brings a black prostitute to the table uninvited. But Borat shows that in today's America a bigot with weird manners can seduce you at first if he has a tidy mustache, a glib smile and a prepossessing appearance. Revivalist Christians speaking in tongues welcome him, and so do some drunken frat boys, who agree they want to wipe out all homosexuals too. At times his feigned bigotry brings out the bigotry of others.
Cohen's Borat is a boor-naïf, probably the only kind of boor this basically gentle comic could assimilate. The mean, knowing ones are more dangerous. Cohen lacks the 'savage indignation" of a powerful satirist like Swift. But what Cohen may be getting at is the danger of apathy and passive ignorance -- the way a person without an awareness of malicious intent can do harm by being a conduit for bigotry, or just looking the other way. He's said in an interview that he's fascinated, if horrified, by the idea that "the path to Auschwitz was paved with indifference."
The path to Borat the film is paved with the best of intentions, and to judge by the extremely positive critical reaction to his (and Larry Charles's) movie from public and critics alike, those intentions have been well received. But though Cohen may be sensitive, intelligent, and sophisticated, his humor is crude, made up of things like talking about excretion at the dinner table; soul-kissing a woman who he then announces is his sister and the best prostitute in town. The way homophobes and Jew-haters are made fun of makes you wonder if anybody intelligent enough to watch this movie and grasp its ulterior motive -- to agitate for compassion  needs these messages. Along with the laughs comes an easy self-satisfaction. Does this take us anywhere? And Cohen's depiction of Borat's home village in Kazakhstan is heavy with its own bigotry and condescension.
How does Kazakhstan feel about all this? Unless the New York Times and other big media are victims of another one of Cohen's hoaxes, a top Kazakhstan official has just declared the country indebted to the movie: "any publicity is good publicity," he's said, inviting Cohen to visit his country (to which the comic has never been). Ultimately the movie, though widely celebrated as "hysterically funny," isn't very smart. It's bold, and numerous lawsuits against the filmmakers by their previously willing dupes are a tribute to that; but its "originality" is restricted to saying the unmentionable, like a pubescent boy trying to impress his buddies, or all the post-pubescent boys who enjoy Jackass or Ashton Kutcher's "Punk'd" or the National Lampoon. The whole idea goes back forty years or so to "Candid Camera." Maybe the reason why Borat has been so well reviewed is that this isn't a stellar cinematic year. The critics are just a bit desperate. But the peculiar circumstances of Cohen's and Charles's film-making are something one would like to know more about. It appears they're making fun of the naivety of Americans, not just of bigots, but his working method simply takes advantage of how polite people are  especially when then know they're being filmed.