Borat

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan wants to give us a new way of looking at ourselves. It is British comic Sasha Baron Cohen's attempt at satire. He travels through the United States as Kazakh journalist Borat Sagdiyev, who is trying to find what makes America the great nation it is and then help make Kazakhstan into a great nation as well. Along the way, Baron Cohen performs his fish-out-of-water foreigner shtick with the people he meets in unscripted conversations. The interaction between Borat and others allows prejudices and customs to be explored and skewered.

Along the way, he ridicules anti-Semitism, both gays and homophobes, frat boys, Pentecostal Christians, feminism and a few other politically incorrect topics. That is the attraction of this film for many -- that it takes on political correctness -- that it allows an unsophisticated foreigner to say things we don't feel we can say even if we want to. Of course as satire, that politically incorrectness is itself ridiculed.

Most of the time, Borat plays the fool, which allows those he meets to give themselves enough rope to hang themselves. We see a bit of the falsehood that lies beneath much of daily life. The value of satire is that it reflects the foibles of life in a humorous way, allowing us to discover that the very thing we laugh at is in us.

There are certainly many things in American life that cry out for satire. It's good for us from time to time to allow ourselves to be the butt of the joke. It deflates our egos a bit and may goad us into making positive changes in the way we live.

It's too bad that Borat isn't the vehicle that allows us to do so. The satire in the film is just plain too smug with itself. Most of the laughs come not from the responses Borat elicits from others but from the unsophistication of Borat himself. We laugh at the clown rather than getting a chance to laugh at the flaws that the clown shows us. So it really doesn't quite end up being the satire it sets out to be. Rather it allows the viewer to marvel at how much more advanced and erudite we are than such a small country bumpkin like Borat.

One measure of just how far the film falls short of being good satire is that although it runs a lean 84 minutes, it can't even fill that time with clever comedy. Rather it constantly relies on sophomoric sexual and scatological visuals for laughs. That may well attract a certain demographic and account for its box office appeal, but it demeans the kind of film this could have become.