The Kazakh ambassador thinks he's funny but doesn't like his making "a comedy out of a people who have had so many tragedies in their history." Australian journalists are eager to interview him but are bristling at the restrictions imposed upon his promotional press conferences. Everyone is wondering if what he does is even ethical. And now his own studio, 20th Century Fox, is dropping more than half the screens his film was supposed to open on next Friday, with the excuse that there is too low a level of awareness about the film to justify a wider release, at least for now.

No one, it seems, knows quite what to make of Borat.

I saw the film last night: I can't remember the last time I laughed so hard or have been so stunned by a movie -- studio, foreign, indy, whatever. Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan is one of the most outrageous and most provocative things I've ever seen. It is shocking, some of the things people say on camera to Sacha Baron Cohen in character as the naive Neanderthal Eastern European TV reporter. But all he does is hold up a mirror and let these people be themselves. Is a mirror unethical? There are those onscreen who behave with integrity, for all that they are being duped by Baron Cohen -- in those cases, Borat is the butt of the joke. But for the most part, this is a startling unpleasant portrait of America, and disparaging the messenger doesn't change the message.

So it's really gratifying on a lot of levels to see Fox running scared with Borat -- they know it'll do well with the smarty-pants Web demographic and snarky college kids ... but how will middle America handle being shown up as no different from Borat and his unenlightened provincialism? (And I mean "middle America" as an attitude, not a geography; there's "middle America" in the middle of Manhattan, and there're smarty-pantses in the middle of Iowa.) It's not often Hollywood asks us to check out a movie that challenges our complacency rather than reassuring it ... but Fox is running with the film, and does plan to expand its release if called for -- they're scared, not to the point of abandoning the movie altogether. Borat isn't another Jackass, which might be outrageous but has no point in being so except to indulge the juvenile idiocies of the audience -- Baron Cohen's genius is in turning juvenile idiocies around in self-condemnation.

For that alone, I can't wait to see whether Borat becomes a word-of-mouth phenomenon that middle Americans everywhere clamor to see even though it's not so nice to them, or whether it remains a cultish novelty that appeals only to those already sympatico with its daring.

  Borat: The First Four Minutes

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MaryAnn Johanson
author of The Totally Geeky Guide to The Princess Bride
minder of FlickFilosopher.com

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