Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, a scathing satire of a phobic USA, is delivered in outrageous comedic style. It ends up splitting its audience into two camps: those who are in on the film's joke, and those who are its targets, which raises questions about the film's effectiveness. Will those in on it, disarmed and moved by laughter, be affected by the movie's deeper implications? Will the targets be able to watch it and take away anything of value? And should anyone expect them to? After all, prejudice is an unsavory subject to tackle -- the educated think they're above it, average citizens put themselves on the defensive when it's brought up, and those with true prejudices aren't aware of them or don't think anything of it. 

For the uninitiated, Borat is a character played by Sacha Baron Cohen, originally introduced to audiences on his British TV program, Da Ali G Show. The character's comic gimmick is that he's a journalist from the country of Kazakhstan, visiting America to pick up on a culture he reveres. But when he interviews his subjects in the USA, he comes off as a way-out-there backwoods foreigner, a boob that's unfamiliar with American civil conventions and tries the patience of people who might not have even heard of Kazakhstan. He also blatantly reveals his own prejudices (for instance, he fears Jews and thinks lowly of women), often in a cheerful and unassuming manner, in the process. Through such interactions, these American citizens drop their guard before the likeable and apparently clueless visitor, revealing a lot about themselves and the general ignorance of the society they live in.

The movie stretches this idea to feature film length (while complemented by a few absolutely outrageous written gags), but the joke never loses its steam because watching real people patronize or condescend to this character, someone they presumably believe is authentic (thus revealing an innate prejudice and misunderstanding of foreigners), continues to elicit reactions of incredulity from its audience. Simply put: I just couldn't believe what some of these people said, how some of them reacted, and how none of them seemed to realize Borat was a put-on.

I kept thinking to myself that much of this had to be scripted, but all claims have been to the contrary. The people behind Borat are proud to announce they have rigged a risky comic stunt -- perhaps not unique when compared to similar ambush-style comedy of the past, but pointed in how it specifically seeks to make social statements in the process.

Borat is undeniably funny because it dares to go to dangerous places, with a dangerous sense of humor -- belittling out-of-touch people who don't know better, making fun of their ignorance, and, yes, daring to create a fake Kazakh persona and having us buy in on the premise that it's all right to laugh at the obvious bumblings of this blatant Eastern European stereotype. But is it therefore also valuable? For the group that's in on the joke, it may be a sweet brand of medicine, for as much as we think it's obvious that, say, "racism is bad," we don't really understand how deep our inherent prejudices go. We don't like to be faced with that kind of self-exploration. People become defensive when being spoken to about racism -- we don't readily believe it can reside in us at different levels, we want to believe that once we become aware of its wrongness, we are cleansed of it, no further discussion necessary. The same might be said of sexism; meanwhile, homophobia still has a long way to go.

Borat's genuine, non-proselytizing approach to the subject is therefore a welcome and cathartic method of bringing it up. The movie shows how prejudices are deep-seated and how they show up in so many different ways. Borat greets several regular-looking middle class people who accept him and his casual derogatory references to Jews and women without putting up much of a fuss (a feminist group might've been the only exception). Many of the people appear to be well-meaning, yet reveal their prejudices just as casually, providing a contrast that highlights the raw ugliness of their statements against the joviality of Baron Cohen's act. And the most horrific ones, of course, are the obviously ignorant statements uttered loudly as truths, from rants against Middle Easterners to sexist remarks to sermons dismissing scientific thought. We are allowed our guffaws, but we should still reel from the shock that comes with it -- the movie is correct to calculate that its audience will feel  they're above the kind of people being targeted, but it's also hoping to deliver a larger concern in the process: that this sickness is everywhere, right under our noses, and we should be frightened.

Borat makes it hip for the hipsters to mock prejudice -- it heightens the awareness of how easy it is to spot insensitive discrimination and to call it out; and by being funny, it relaxes our urge to resist addressing this generally ugly issue. Hopefully, it's also enough to cause us to reflexively examine ourselves for our own fears of differences -- what it does say about people in general is that we tend to easily accept any assumptions made about those we're unfamiliar with.

Meanwhile, one wonders what a person of prejudice would be able to take away from the experience of watching Borat at all. My concern is that such a person wouldn't learn anything from it, but if entertainers such as Baron Cohen can continue to make prejudice look so uncool, then perhaps our best hope is that larger portions of future generations will always be in on the joke.

(Released by Twentieth Century Fox and rated "R" for pervasive strong crude and sexual content including graphic nudity, and language.)

Review also posted at www.windowtothemovies.com.