Like many foreigners arriving in the United States, Sacha Baron Cohen's Kazakh journalist Borat just wants to fit in and learn the ways of Americans. To this effect, we see Borat consult a humor coach because he has heard that "Americans are known for their sense of humor."
We'll see how true that is as Cohen's flat-out funny and scathing cultural satire, "Borat! Cultural Leanings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan," opens across the country today. The film's distributor, 20th Century Fox, recently scaled back the number of theaters for the movie's opening week, hoping word-of-mouth will trample whatever misgivings some might have in seeing their fellow Americans — and, let's face it, ourselves to one degree or another — mercilessly lampooned.
Cohen's Borat character was one of three alter egos he used in his HBO series "Ad Ali G Show" to lay bare cultural prejudices and attitudes. Wearing a cheap gray suit, the bony Borat would approach real people and, in his own backward way, ask them for help. In one bit, he asked a karate teacher to tell him the best defense against the dreaded "Jew claw." (The instructor obliged.)
Cohen, for the record, comes from a devout Jewish family, studied history at Cambridge and wrote his thesis paper on the Jewish involvement in America's civil rights movement. He uses the Borat character to — in the best tradition of humor — provoke outrage so that we may better the silly and stupid state of humanity.
Cohen's comedy is sharp, precise and devastating. "Borat" takes the form of a "cheap" documentary that chronicles the Kazakh journalist's first visit to America. Essentially, it's a loose grouping of skits that has Borat crisscrossing the U.S., mostly through the South, in his ultimate quest to meet and marry America's one-time leading cultural export — "Baywatch's" Pamela Anderson.
Borat is the master of disaster, leaving a trail of unsuspecting real-world victims in his wake. After the New York humor coach teaches him some valuable lessons that he will expertly apply throughout his journey, Borat meets with a group of feminists, wanting to understand America's strangely progressive attitudes toward women. But after a circular conversation that goes nowhere, he complains — with his trademark look of innocent confusion — of one woman, "I could not understand what this old man was saying."
Borat's assimilation continues at about that pace. A society dinner goes OK (sort of) with the matron telling Borat she thinks he could, with a little training, be Americanized. That was before he returned from the bathroom carrying his feces back to the table in a plastic bag.
A rodeo organizer in Virginia tells Borat homosexuals should be hanged. Borat then goes out to sing the national anthem, but not before saying a few words to the crowd: "We support your war of terror!" Much applause. He then raises the hope that "Premier George W. Bush will drink the blood of every man, woman and child in Iraq."
There are encounters with drunken frat boys, babbling Pentecostals, "my friend Mr. Jesus" and an elderly husband and wife who welcome Borat and his hairy, overweight producer (how hairy and overweight are alarmingly revealed later in one eye-searing scene) Azamat (Ken Davitian) into their bed-and-breakfast. When Borat discovers the couple is Jewish, they jump out the window. "Let's go back to New York," Azamat begs. "At least there are no Jews there."
And so it goes all the way to California, with Borat losing Azamat, gaining a grizzly bear and ambushing everyone in the path of his rented ice cream truck. It's a tour-de-force of comic acting — Cohen's performance here will go down in history (in infamy?) as an all-time classic. To paraphrase the movie's title, "Borat" make benefit glorious for everyone — provided you like your disturbing insights served up rude and crude.
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