Enjoy Borat while you can, because the cutting-edge cache of this dim-witted, sex-obsessed and astonishingly hirsute "Kazakh journalist" is going to last about 15 more minutes.
This is not due to any fault of Sacha Baron Cohen, his intrepid creator, or of his movie, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. But imagine, if you will, the fraternity brother across the street who, at this very moment, is reaching into his mini-fridge for a Coors Light and punctuating the occasion by screeching, "Niiiice! I like you!" It is these, and the millions of others clinging to Borat's every accented catchphrase, who will soon reduce Baron Cohen's character to a punch-line. Which is a pity, because Borat provides some of the sharpest comedy to hit the mainstream in recent memory. Much like Baron Cohen's other outrageous characters, Borat traffics in a peculiar species of laughter that might best be called Cringe Comedy. With his stranger-in-a-strange-land routine, Borat says and does what most socialized people would never dream of doing, and in the process, provides a few glimpses of ludicrous human behavior that bruise your conscience as much as they tickle your funny bone.
Borat began as a minor character on Da Ali G Show, and besides the addition of a loose narrative, his first feature film does little to stray from his familiar routine. The basic formula of an encounter with Borat goes as follows: Borat attempts to learn about a cultural practice by engaging in it first-hand. His essential "foreignness" -- and fondness for pornography and casual anti-Semitism -- lands him in hot water with the unsuspecting subject. Uncomfortable squirming follows.
Despite a limited formula, expanding Borat from a 15-minute sketch character to the star of a full-length movie proves surprisingly successful.
This is because, in some respects, Borat plays like an old-fashioned road-trip movie. He begins as a hapless TV journalist from Kazakhstan who sets out for New York City to make a documentary about America. After becoming enamored with the chesty actress Pamela Anderson, Borat bumbles from one end of the country to another in pursuit of her, dragging along his reluctant and even more amazingly hairy producer, Azamat.
Their adventures in the American South provide for the film's biggest laughs and eeriest chills. It's hard to keep a straight face when Borat shocks a table full of etiquette experts in Alabama with a napkin-full of his own feces. But a viewer's reactions can veer more toward outright horror when he encounters a rodeo manager who openly advocates killing homosexuals or a gunshop owner who doesn't hesitate when asked to recommend the best weapon for shooting Jews.
As a performer, Baron Cohen's greatest virtue is his fearlessness (not to mention his amazing propensity for growing luxuriant moustaches). But it is this same fearlessness that lends the movie its most uncomfortable moments. More uneasiness enters the equation when you consider the apparently quasi-legal consent of the film's subjects. While the idiotic Ali G focused most of his energies on humiliating public figures, one can't help but wonder if Borat's regular-Joe targets are a bit too easy to hit.
But if Baron Cohen is partly aiming to produce a film of biting social satire, he thankfully never loses sight of his own clownishness. Just when the film is at its most bruising, Baron Cohen whips together an extended male-nude-wrestling scene that can only be justly described as a piece of cinematic history. It proves that, while Borat is certainly more than its catchphrases, it's not above the cheap laughs.
