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

Sacha Baron Cohen gives us one of the funniest and most pointed satires in years -- and also one of the most complex.

By Stephanie Zacharek

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The Running of the Jew

Nov. 3, 2006 | Great humor is often cruel, and by laughing, we -- the audience -- are complicit in that cruelty. "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan," the faux documentary starring (and conceived by) English comedian Sacha Baron Cohen and directed by Larry Charles, is a pure example of the way good satire can never be clean, either for the perpetrator or for the viewer. The movie has already attracted some controversy: The Anti-Defamation League has released a statement about it, acknowledging that Cohen uses "humor to unmask the absurd and irrational side of anti-Semitism and other phobias born of ignorance and fear" before moving in for the clincher: "We are concerned, however, that one serious pitfall is that the audience may not always be sophisticated enough to get the joke, and that some may even find it reinforcing their bigotry."

But that, I'm afraid, is the way the knish crumbles. If the public needs to be protected from humor, then there's no way humor can do its job -- particularly if that job is sometimes a dirty one. In "Borat," Cohen plays Borat Sagdiyev, a joyously anti-Semitic, bigoted, sex-obsessed, disco-dancing, English-mangling Kazakh TV journalist who comes to America to report on the customs and mores of the American people. This is one of the funniest and most pointed satires in years, but it's also one of the most complex, not so much because of the way it so outrageously exaggerates Borat's anti-Semitism, but because Cohen's methods -- which depend on bamboozling ordinary citizens -- are sometimes morally suspect. I've seen "Borat" twice, and I laughed almost as hard the second time as I did the first. But both times I left the movie feeling a little shaky, as if I'd just taken part in an amusement achieved by questionable means. Everyone who sees and enjoys "Borat" will walk away with a favorite line from it. (I'm somewhat partial to the way he approaches a pleasant Midwestern woman running a yard sale and, believing she's a gypsy, shakes an old Barbie at her accusingly: "Who is this lady you have shrunk?") But the true brilliance of "Borat" may lie deeply buried between the almost infinite number of quotable lines: Sometimes we can't face up to our own capacity for cruelty -- but at least we can get a gag out of it.

We first meet Borat in his small Kazakh hometown, a jumble of huts and dirt roads, where he introduces us to his sister, who is the region's top prostitute (she puts the capper on the gag by proudly brandishing a trophy), and also to "the town mechanic and abortionist." At one point he waves toward a bunch of kids playing in the dirt, with guns, identifying it as the town kindergarten. Borat explains his assignment: The state-run TV network is sending him to America, with his producer and cameraman Azamat (Ken Davilian), to film a documentary that will help them modernize things at home. And so Borat arrives in New York, wearing a drapey, gray off-the-rack suit that seems vaguely out of date, in an Old World kind of way, but not so weird that anyone on 42nd Street would look twice at it. His hair is teased high into a disco-Glasnost pompadour; his mustache, a furry love letter to Groucho, or maybe to Tom Selleck, sets off a row of Pepsodent-white choppers -- even his teeth are in love with capitalism.

Borat is a naif in a strange land -- awed by the luxury of his standard midtown hotel room, he freshens his face with water from the toilet bowl -- but he doesn't come to America unarmed: He has the ability to charm us and to skewer us, and he does both. In New York, he meets with a group of women called Veteran Feminists of America; as they earnestly and valiantly try to explain to him that women are the equals of men, he cuts them off with a smirk: "Give me a smile, baby, why angry face?" But he does learn something from these women: He has fallen deeply in love with Pamela Anderson's "Baywatch" character, CJ, after catching a rerun on his hotel-room TV, and he asks the feminists if they know her. One of them explains, rather patiently, that CJ is just a character, but the actress who plays her is Pamela Anderson, and she lives in Los Angeles. So Borat, secretly hoping to get to L.A. to meet his true love, convinces the reluctant Azamat that they must leave New York to discover the "real" America, a land of cowboys and rodeos, of Southerners and "chocolate faces."

Next page: Cohen doesn't choose his targets indiscriminately