Why Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan Didn’t Go Far Enough.
The movie is hilarious. The unscripted moments where Americans say the darndest things, the bungled broken English phrases that beg to be quoted, the physical comedy that continues until the theater is hysterical, then uproarious. The San Francisco Chronicle perhaps describes it best as "screamingly, hysterically, laugh-through-the-next-joke, laugh-for-the-next-week funny."
But humor isn’t the point.
Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat! isn’t a comedy, it is a documentary. It is still unclear how much of the movie is comprised of actual events, but several scenes have already been shown to be authentic. It is rare to see a reverse mockumentary: a movie that is made to look fictional but is actually real, yet Baron Cohen most likely obscured his method because the movie would be processed very differently as an anthropological observation of the prejudices of American society than as a straight up comedy. When watching something that is equally absurdly realistic and absurdly unrealistic, viewers are left wondering if this could possibly be real, and then, if it could possibly not be.
Your typical comedian’s comedy is something along the lines of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, Happy Gilmore or The 40-Year Old Virgin – an extended Saturday Night Live segment based on characters that can’t quite adjust to the mores of mainstream society. Baron Cohen is certainly intelligent and funny enough to pull off a fictionalized comedy about a jackass fumbling his way through a disaffected world, but his choice not to do so is a deliberate one. This is a Cambridge man. His priority isn’t lowbrow entertainment, it’s the education of a mass audience. A moviegoer’s underestimation of Baron Cohen is akin to one of the poor saps in the movie underestimating Borat.
Unfortunately, the audience that needs a tolerance lesson most is the one least likely to recognize it as such. Hence, all the concern from anti-defamation groups that fear that the movie will only further perpetuate negative stereotypes – about gays, about feminists, about Jews. Baron Cohen goes far, but not far enough. While watching Borat!, some of us may recognize the latent intolerance of our country as an aggravation we have to contend with in our daily lives, some of us may be unpleasantly surprised that people really speak this way, but the rifle salesman who reacts unflinchingly to Borat’s request for a gun “to shoot Jew” will probably just see the movie and think, “So?”
If Baron Cohen really wants to be part of the solution, he’s going to have to do more than point out the problem without comment or concern. But maybe that’s where his battle ends and ours begins. In the first two weeks alone, the movie took in over $67 million worth of viewers.
The rest is up to us.