Director: Larry Charles
Writer: Sacha Baron Cohen, Anthony Hines
Cast: Sacha Baron Cohen, Ken Davitian and Luenell
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan is a hilarious romp through American culture, featuring no end of political incorrectness, political and social scrutiny, and sex jokes. What little plot exists is consumed by the humor and the gags. Comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, who stars in and co-wrote Borat, used a blend of reality entertainment with fiction to make his movie unique. Still, this is not, as some have heralded it to be, the funniest movie ever made, or even a masterpiece.
The plot is practically nonexistent. The title character, Borat Sagdiyev, is a Kazakhstani reporter commissioned by his country to make a documentary about American culture. When he arrives, he finds a picture of Pamela Anderson, and decides to go across the country to California to marry her. That’s all there is to the plot, but it serves as excuse for Borat to act politically incorrect in real situations.
Essentially, the way Cohen and director Larry Charles structured the movie is that, apart from a few well-written fictional scenes, the majority of the film consists of Cohen acting opposite a bunch of people who genuinely think that they’re in a Kazakstani documentary. This allows Cohen, as Borat, to act as politically offensive as he likes. In a sense, Cohen is a smarter version of Tom Green.
The character is racist and misguided. Borat is anti-semitic. He comes from a village where there is an annual “running of the Jew,” so when he accidentally ends up at a Jewish home, the movie becomes a sort of Blair Witch Project imitation. He is homophobic, but he can’t tell which people are gay. He kisses men on the street, then acts surprised when, after participating in a gay pride parade, that he was fraternizing with homosexuals. Some of these events are staged; almost all are improvised. The more political ones are nothing short of hilarious.
Unfortunately, the film often degrades itself with moronic, biological humor. Toilet jokes and sex jokes run rampant. While the rest of the movie is intentionally dumb, these gags come across as purely stupid. There is a gratuitous—though amusing—scene where Borat wrestles in the nude with his overweight manager. In another scene, he brings a bag of poop to a formal dinner party, and then invites a prostitute. These scenes completely degrade the otherwise intelligent nature of a film that could have been a pure social commentary.
The other problem that Borat has is that, since these scenes are staged or improvised, the camera work is horrible and varies in quality throughout the film. Due to the spontaneous nature of the scenes, it would be very hard for Larry Charles to have found a way to use clearer camera work, but the fact remains that the camerawork is often atrocious. While there are a few moments where the camera is made part of the movie, the fact remains that the appalling cinematography often detracts from the storytelling.
Still, despite the poor camera work, sex gags and toilet humor, Borat manages to entertain. It is a film with a number of important social messages about American and even Kazakhstani culture. If it weren’t for the fact that the film feels the need to rely on the grosser kind of humor too prevalent in comedies these days, it might have been a perfect blend of reality entertainment and fictional storytelling. Still, the film is hilarious and often enlightening.