I was actually planning on writing a double-review of Happy Feet and Borat, but after having just heard about the racially-charged outburst Michael Richards (a.k.a. Seinfeld's Kramer) directed towards a patron of the comedy club where he was performing, I feel that the film Borat is of particular moment and that Happy Feet really does feel rather silly in comparison.
The film Borat, which is the brainchild of star and creator Sacha Baron Cohen (of Talladega Nights fame), is brilliant in that in manages to effectively tackle a very serious issue, bigotry, without resorting to the usual harrowing imagery or story conventions. Apparently, bigotry can be the subject of a comedy, and it does work from a narrative perspective.
The movie's first triumph is how it turns the whole fish-out-of-water convention which we saw essayed by the likes of Robin Williams in Moscow on the Hudson and by other actors playing U.S. immigrants. This man who is new to American soil is not charmingly naive as most mainstream Hollywood immigrants are portrayed: he is racist, sexist, homophobic and insensitive to those who are mentally deficient. Cohen touches all the bases here, and plays the character with aplomb besides.
Borat is a Kazakhstani news reporter sent to United States to learn more about it (hence the movie's much longer actual title, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit of Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, or something like that), and his research is supposed to take him to New York. However, while in his hotel room, he watches Baywatch on TV and ends up driving across America in an ice cream truck with his producer (whom he tricks, naturally) to meet her. And it is here that the film's real odyssey begins.
It seems that Borat has resonated considerably with audiences in America, the very people of whose prejudices it pokes fun. I think this is of particular relevance because the truth about people, and not just Americans, is that we are, for all our pretensions to the contrary, still very much like Borat at heart. We all still harbor prejudices, many of them irrational, towards people who are different from us, whether it is because of their skin color, sexual orientation, religion or even their socio-economic status.
Michael Richards' outburst, as well as Mel Gibson's drunken rant have demonstrated that bigotry is hardly the monopoly of the redneck (a similarly pejorative, discriminatory term), and that Americans cannot blow off the lessons that Borat has to teach, considering that deep down, in some or possibly even many of them, a latent racist/sexist/homophobe still lurks.
Borat pretends to be a screwball comedy, complete with the most gross-out nudity you will ever see in your life, easily surpassing the sex scene of the obese in Sideways, but its agenda runs considerably deeper than that, and the satire, when you think about it, is really rather scathing. It essentially holds up a mirror, which, while primarily meant for Americans to gaze into, is there for everyone else to see, as well, and while it's not necessarily comfortable to look at, it sure is funny.
1 comment:
Yeah, Jim. Everyone's a little bit racist(sexist, etc). And it's perfectly ok.
Now, being politically correct? That's only making the problem worse by adding a layer of fake politeness, sidestepping the issue entirely; whatever makes us sleep better at night, I guess.
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