Speaking of Tierney, his Saturday column on Borat got me to rethinking my take on the movie. Not the “funniest movie I’ve ever seen part.” I’ve never laughed harder in a theater.

But stories that have emerged about the movie since it opened have tainted my appreciation a bit. I remember wondering during and just after the movie how much video didn’t get used. That is, how many Americans in flyover country treated Cohen’s character quite well and didn’t make the movie — because they didn’t provide reactions that made for good comedy. You’re supposed to walk away with the impression that America is crude, still mired in racism, uncouth, and uncultured. I wonder how much of that is true.

Even some of the people who did make the cut were remarkably restrained. As Tierney (and Christopher Hitchens) point out, the people at the Georgia dinner party, for example, were remarkably kind to Cohen, considering that he’d just (a) insulted one of the wives, (2) gave one woman a bag filled with human feces, and (3) invited a scantily-clad prostitute to the dinner table. If the movie was all about Cohen’s comedic bravado and America’s shocked reaction to it — Jackass, in other words — that would be fine.

But the movie went further. It was edited to look as if the dinner party in Georgia threw Cohen out only after the black prostitute came over, leading the audience to think that latent (or blatant) racism was at play (remember the cut to the drive home, where Cohen asks the prostitute if that kind of thing happens a lot — or the camera shot of the street name, “Secession Drive”). Maybe the folks at that party were bigoted. But there’s a more benign explanation for what happened, too. Perhaps they finally realized they were being hoaxed, and — like just about anyone else in that position might have done — called the cops when they realized this guy wasn’t a clueless foreigner, but a man who took advantage of their hospitality by insulting them, and exploiting their goodwill.

Same goes for the antique dealers in Texas. When you consider the fact that Cohen basically stole several hundred dollars worth of their property (buy intentionally breaking it to provide good footage for the movie), their reaction was really pretty admirable.

I won’t apologize for the frat guys, who deserved most of what they got.

But now comes word that Cohen was also pretty crappy to the villagers in the little hamlet he portrayed as his native Kazakhstan. Turns out, it was a real village, in Romania, and the people there had no idea they were being made to look backward, dirty, and foolish. This, to me, really makes Cohen look like a jerk. He ought to give the people in that village a little cut of the movie’s proceeds.

The movie was still hilarious. And if it were painted as mere exploitive comedy, that would be one thing. But the film is edited and narrated in a way that makes Cohen out to be a kind of comedic muckraker — a character actor we’re supposed to sympathize with, who uses guerrilla comedy to draw out and expose America’s dirty laundry. I’ve no doubt that the bigotry and ugliness we were supposed to see in Borat really do exist in much of America. But I don’t think Cohen was honest in how he went about finding it. And in that sense Cohen looks more like an opportunist than a trustworthy, sympathetic broker in a Kazakh suit.

Which means Borat succeeds really only as a crude comedy. It’s a damned funny crude comedy. But it doesn’t deserve to be considered as much more than that.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 14th, 2006 at 12:21 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.