Overall Rating
  Awesome: 57.66%
Worth A Look: 12.96%
Average: 6.2%
Pretty Bad: 5.47%
Total Crap: 17.7%
14 reviews, 464 user ratings
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| Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan |
by Rob Gonsalves
"A cracked but accurate mirror on post-9/11 America."
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"Borat" made me laugh harder and longer than any comedy since the sunnier days of "There’s Something About Mary," "The Big Lebowski," and the "South Park" movie. Those movies, you will note, were all pre-9/11; "Borat" may be the first true post-9/11 farce, a gleeful monument of anti-American contempt, both scorning and in love with our national mood of truculent ignorance.When the crude but essentially innocent Kazakh TV reporter Borat Sagdiyev (Sacha Baron Cohen) wanders into various low-rent American rituals, the bigots and sexists stand and unfold themselves with an air of pride. Most of Borat’s scenarios are genuine and unscripted — Baron Cohen’s character interacts with actual people having actual reactions to what he says and does. The results aren’t pretty. But, as another great comedian once opined, comedy is not pretty.
Accompanied by portly assistant Azamat (Ken Davitian), who’s sort of Sancho Panza to Borat’s don Quixote, Borat ventures from backwards Kazakhstan to New York in search of “cultural learnings” to bring back to his people. He finds very little there except a yearning for Pamela Anderson, whose bouncy form he spots on Baywatch. Thus, over Azamat’s objections, the pair leave New York for California, passing through a variety of redneck hot spots seemingly handpicked by Baron Cohen for the sheer quantity of wrongness they can yield. Borat shows up at a rodeo, winning the crowd over by voicing his support of Bush’s “war of terror” but losing them with the Kazakhstan national anthem, sung to the tune of our own but with new lyrics citing Kazakhstan’s superior export of potassium.
To what extent is Borat — a mockumentary presuming to place a fake character among the unaware — presented in bad faith? Realistically, we know that much of what we see was meticulously pre-planned and probably set up by Baron Cohen’s producers. Ed Gonzalez of Slant has theorized that some of Borat’s targets, like the rodeo crowd or a Southern dinner-party group, seem to turn on him not because he’s finally hit their tipping point but because they’ve figured out they’re being duped. In that respect, Borat is at times a meta-comedy, getting its laughs from the idea of what’s happening. And occasionally, as with a gentleman at the rodeo who agrees with Borat that gays should be lynched, the movie strikes chilling gold.
Borat bumbles over to a group of black guys and asks for pointers to be more like them. Then he takes what he’s learned into a snobby white hotel and is rudely ejected. Borat hasn’t much respect for the pale or the male: in the most alarming sequence, Borat hitches a ride with a Winnebago of frat boys and listens mostly silently as they expound on how women and minorities should be slaves. Do these people forget there’s a camera on them, or do they just not care? Naively homophobic and anti-Semetic, Borat stumbles into situations wherein he interacts, with varying degrees of intimacy, with Jews and gays without knowing it. The point is clear: his culture has instilled fear and loathing of The Other (including Uzbekistan) into him, for no logical reason. And we’re meant to see that Borat isn’t much different from many Americans that way.
By far the most uproarious sequence — you’ll either hit the aisle running or hit the floor howling — has nothing much to do with Kazakh/American relations at all: naked Borat and naked Azamat in a hotel room, embroiled in a furious wrestling match over the honor of Pamela Anderson. I won’t spoil it further: like the best comedy bits, just when you think it can’t get any wilder, it does, and then it keeps going. Some will find it too protracted or grotesque; I had trouble breathing.But "Borat" has more on its mind than bare-ass slapstick — it’s not Andy Kaufman’s Foreign Man meets "Candid Camera." At its most cutting, it uses the guileless fool Borat to lull (or provoke) people into being their ugly real selves. It’ll go down as some sort of rude punk-rock snapshot of an America that quails at two men kissing (Borat favors pecking men on the cheek and lips in greeting) but cheers the notion of George W. Bush drinking the blood of “every man, woman and child in Iraq.” Nope, not pretty at all.
link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=14895&reviewer=416
originally posted: 11/05/06 12:54:15
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OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2006 Toronto Film Festival For more in the 2006 Toronto Film Festival series, click here.
TV to Screen: For more in the TV to Screen series, click here.
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USA
03-Nov-2006 (R)
DVD: 06-Mar-2007
UK
03-Nov-2006 (15)
Australia
23-Nov-2006 (MA)
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