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

(2006)

Directed by

Larry Charles

Review by Zach Saltz

Oh, how backward we are in this country when it comes to our film appreciation.  A few weeks ago, a little film called Jackass: Number Two hit movie theaters and was reviled by highfalutin film critics, happy to exchange witty jabs such as “a way to spend 90 minutes completely devoid of social benefit” (M.K. Terrell of the Christian Science Monitor) and “to call the humor sophomoric would be to overstate is sophistication” (Joe Leydon, Variety Magazine).  It found its most appreciative audiences almost purely in immature high school to college-aged males (like myself, I’m almost ashamed to say).  It was released, big for a week, faded away quicker than The Knack, and now awaits a short lifespan on the “discounted DVDs” section at Best Buy.

And now we are presented with an unpleasant little film called Borat, which, like Jackass: Number Two is chalk full of scatological humor and jokes most fourth graders would find juvenile.  And how are the critics responding to this new film?  Naturally, by calling it the funniest movie ever made.  J. Hoberman of the Village Voice calls its enfant terrible lead actor-writer-creator Sacha Baron Cohen “a courageous political satirist and genuinely experimental film artist.”  Manohla Douglas of the New York Times calls the film “pitiless and brainy.”  That’s right, the New York Times called Borat brainy.  It currently has a 91% “fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes (to put that in relative terms, Forrest Gump received a 79% and Jackass: Number Two received a 59% -- due in large part, no doubt, to the fact that the vast majority of Rotten Tomatoes’ pseudo-critics are indeed immature high-school to college-aged males).

That’s not to say Jackass: Number Two and Borat are the same film.  One film is about a bunch of American guys who like to make defecation jokes, the other is about some Kazakhstani guys who like to make defecation jokes.  And one film involves some pretty nasty stuff with horses, the other one involves some nasty stuff with a bear (I’ll leave it to you to guess which one is which.)  But both films have more nudity than most Peter Greenaway and Pier Paolo Passolini films combined, and given that 99% of it is male nudity, the result is less than pleasant – and certainly radically different from what immature high-school to college-aged males used to see.  Maybe the right-wing conspiracists were not too far from the truth when they screamed in our faces that Brokeback Mountain would turn American males into gay cowboys.

By now we are probably all familiar with the loose remnants of Borat’s excuse for a plot.  Its title character, who may or may not suffer from severe mental deficiencies (he is apparently unfamiliar with the concept of a properly-functioning toilet), is on sent on a glorious mission by the Kazakhstani government to discover what the United States is doing right so that a third-world country like Kazakhstan can emulate it (such a wonderful idea in the era of Bush 43).  So Borat, who looks a little like the Soup Nazi, comes to America with his fat cameraman to document in lurid detail how stupid we Americans actually are.  Along the way, he falls for Pamela Anderson and begins a mythical journey westward to save her from the pitfalls of her less-than-pure sexual practices, like Harry Dean Stanton’s search for Nastassia Kinski in Paris, Texas.  As he travels to L.A., he meets some very naïve, stupid people who seem content to make themselves idiots by agreeing to be in such a film as the personifications of wary and unfunny social stereotypes (the gay paraders, the debonair southern belle, the drunk college kids, etc.)

What Borat should have been, ideally, is as much an exercise in humor as an indictment of the American way of life.  The opportunities here are ripe: We see Borat at a rodeo, a posh New York hotel, a bed-and-breakfast run by Orthodox Jews, and even a radical Evangelical church.  But the payoff is strangely never quite what we anticipate.  For instance, when Borat becomes a Jesus freak, all we are presented with is him falling over by the priest’s side in his gloriously non-denominational church, and hitching a ride on the church bus to Los Angeles.  Couldn’t this have been funnier?  Why not have Borat be hired as one of those quasi-professional “soul savers” who go up to strangers on the street and try vainly to save them, like the kids in Jesus Camp?  Why not have Borat host an episode of The 700 Club?  Why not have Borat challenge Pat Robertson to leg-pressing 2000 pounds? 

So which film is better, Jackass: Number Two or “the funniest film ever made”?  Hard to say.  But one thing is for certain: the amount of serious critical praise for Borat is astonishing.  Perhaps the real joke is on us, the sage and sophisticated film viewer: We go in expecting an erudite and biting satire on the American way of life observed through the eyes of an outsider – perhaps not unlike a Paul Mazursky or Jim Jarmusch film – and we come out with our expectations completely destroyed and without gaining a single fraction of insight from the film’s insidious observations of the backward ways we unsavory and obtuse Americans live, save our policies on bathroom decorum.  Now, that’s comedy. 

Not!

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