Review: Borat

I watched Borat with Cal on the weekend. Borat, to those one or two reading this who don’t know, is a comic character created by Brit comic Sacha Baron Cohen. Borat is extravagantly anti-semitic, sexist and racist, and his eager expression of these views sometimes draws similar sentiments out of his victims.
I was expecting a whole lot of this in the Borat movie, but it was not to be. TV Borat excelled at exposing the nasty prejudices beneath the surface of his targets, even if sometimes he seemed blind to the social pressures at work in the situations he engineered (classic case: the astonishing visit to a country bar where he engaged the whole room in singing along with ‘Throw The Jew Down The Well’ – hilarious and terrifying, to see a room full of good ol’ boys happily singing such a horrible song – but it would be simplistic and misleading to conclude that all those singing actually agreed with the sentiment).
Movie Borat does a bit of this, most memorably in a shocking chat with a rodeo producer which worked as effectively as the Borat creation ever could. But mostly, Borat was played for cringe humour, and the laughter came when you saw what horrible situation he would foist upon his next targets. A lot of people fooled by Borat have begun legal action against Baron Cohen – but with only a few exceptions they come out looking good.
To be honest, I was expecting a more cutting satirical exploration of what is going on in American culture, and what I got was a comedy of manners explored through the device of an idiot. My recommendation: wait for video.