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

I did finally go see the film Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan because it has a lot of buzz and it has made a lot of money. But I went into the film knowing that I wasn’t going to like it and I didn’t. This is not intended to be a biography of me and my film watching practices but more of a commentary on this film and the mood it evokes for me. There are too many film reviewers who only like subtitled Hungarian films about dying young. I am not one of those reviewers but there are some movies that are very popular and maybe even funny to many people that I just don’t like and Borat is one of them.

That does not mean that Borat was a bad film, there were certainly many people of different age groups in the theater laughing and sputtering and having a good time, I just wasn’t one of them. Borat is a comedy in the vein of Dumb and Dumber and Eddie Murphy’s The Nutty Professor both films that made a tremendous amount of money, and spurred sequels and prequels and both of which I really hated. They are stupid films with the lowest form of humor, nudity, gross out jokes, and the kinds of jokes teenage boys find funny. And yet people go and laugh at them. And I end up feeling like someone from a different planet sitting there groaning and feeling bad for the supporting cast in the film and waiting impatiently for it all to be over while others around me laugh and enjoy the film. Borat perhaps deserves a little credit beyond these films in that it has a better core idea. It is not just a gross out Hollywood comedy; it bills itself as a documentary tour of the world with a mostly unaccredited and unknowing real life cast.

Borat is the brainchild of Sacha Baron Cohen best known for Da Ali G Show. Cohen is a British comedian here portraying a Kazakh reporter making a documentary in the United States. There has been a lot of controversy surrounding the Borat film because of its unique plot and some questionable release forms. Cohn plays Borat as a Pamela Anderson obsessed man-child who is seemingly guileless in his dealing, but the character is grating. There are certainly some memorable scenes in the film but I would not call the memory pleasant. Luckily there was a lot of hair, motion, and a little black box to keep things from being just too graphic for the audience. There are definitely a lot of adult themes in the film including prostitution but it is the anti-Semitism and racism that are perhaps the most disturbing. Of course it is difficult to tell in any film or reality television series how much of it is real and how much relates to the forced narrative of the editing process.

The Kazakhstan government has been trying to stop the release of the film because it shows them in a bad light as backwards Eastern European hillbillies and it has been banned there. I can see their concern because the film is presented as a documentary of a Kazakhstan newsman’s trip across America so that it makes the depiction of Kazakhstan seem like more than the fictional portrayal that it is. In fact the whole film is portrayed as a documentary of sorts and it is painful to wonder how many of the people who appear in the film understood its full intent to mock. Now that the film has been released and is such a success there are a number of people coming out of the woodwork to complain about their presence in the film. In fact two fraternity boys who are portrayed poorly talking about women and slaves have filed a lawsuit against the film hoping to remove their images from the film. Obviously so far nothing has stopped the release of the film but it is still to be seen whether there is any fallout from the suits. The frat boys allege that they were given lots of alcohol to loosen them up, were given papers to sign after they were already drunk, and were told that the filming was for a foreign documentary. If this is true then I feel not only for the frat boys but for all of the rodeo goers and southern dinner guests and New Yorkers who were beleaguered during the filming and who are probably somewhat embarrassed by the final film.

What is most interesting about the film is how it draws its largest ideas from none other than Michael Moore and his style of belligerent documentary interviewing. Moore showed a new documentary style by skewing his footage and his interviews to fit a preconceived notion and often its interviewees were pawns in Moore’s games. Aside from Charlton Heston who had the sense to stop talking and ask Moore to leave most of the interviewees in Moore’s films end up the butt of Moore’s joke without even knowing that they are being taken advantage of and being shown to be narrow-minded or simple. In Borat Sacha Cohen does the same to a cross section of America exposing the sort of narrow-mindedness that one expects is the most stereotypical. New Yorkers are rude and cold, Southerners are gracious but with continued underlying racial problems, South westerners are bible thumping xenophobes, and Californians are freaks of every creed. Borat of course plays all of this for laughs but it comes across so manipulative, heartless, and cruel that it hardly seems funny.

Borat has become a success at the box office but it remains to be seen how much of the box office goes back to the producers of the film and how much ends up going to cover the myriad of lawsuits the pseudo-documentary has stirred up. The film is a sound skewering of some of deep seeded identity issues America has but it intersperses these few moments with a myriad of juvenile bodily function jokes and grating bumpkin humor. Borat has its moments but in general it is a disappointing and cruel joke on the American public.