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

Posted by Neil Miller (neil@filmschoolrejects.com) on November 3, 2006

Borat came to the U.S. and A to make a movie-film. He wanted to learn about the “greatest country in the world” and make a documentary to benefit his homeland of Kazakhstan. The result? To say the least, a film that shows off how not so great America is; and a man, Sacha Baron Cohen, who has quite possibly exposed himself as the funniest man on the planet.

As the sex-crazed, Jew hating, tactless Borat, British comedian Baron Cohen lights up the silver screen with hijynx, and stuns his audience with painful amounts of laughter. The film is an outward gesture of gratuitous irreverence, following Borat as he travels through America, meeting with some of the most unbelievable characters that our country has to offer. From the edgy New Yorkers who threaten to kick his ass on the subway to the anti-homosexual, gun toting Bush-ite Rodeo manager who advises him to shave his mustache to make him look less like a terrorist to the Right wing Evangelists that try and save his soul and introduce him to Jesus, it is America that seemingly becomes the butt end of each joke. The film, on some higher level of genius on the part of Cohen, exposes some of the “lows” of American culture, a tragic but hilarious sight to be seen.

Another hilarious sight comes at the expense of the lead man himself, and his antics that keep the audience laughing from bell to bell. To be honest, I have not laughed this hard at a film in a long, long time. From his mannerisms to the audacity that he has for showing some skin, Cohen makes every single minute of this film funny. And just like any other comedy, there are moments where the humor must take a back seat to plot development, but not for long in this case. It seems as if every 2 minutes Borat is finding some way to get himself into some predicament that leaves the audience laughing so hard that they are on the verge of having an accident.

But what makes Borat so special is not just Cohen’s uninhibited way, but how well the film works on a whole. Just as Cohen has paraded around from interview to interview never breaking character for a moment, the film does the same. From minute one it looks like a Kazakhstani documentary, and it never breaks its stride even for a moment. The production values can sometimes be inconsistent, making it easy to tell which scenes were stages and which were “on the fly”, but that doesn’t take away from the film’s ability to be absolutely hilarious.

And it is that factor, in the end, that is the overriding truth of Borat’s movie-film: it is 110%, indisputably hilarious. You have to be able to handle some gratuitous male nudity, some anti-Semetic jokes and of course, lots of painfully true forms of Americana, but in the end you will laugh your ass off. While Borat himself may be a bit ignorant to the ways of America, his creator and the man behind the mustache is a genius when it comes to making America laugh.

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