Ouch! What a skewering. This is exactly the film Michael Moore has been trying to make for a decade…and Moore has failed because he forgot his bread and butter – finding humor in the worst of America’s bad habits. Sacha Baron Cohen, however, knew exactly where to look as he breathed life into Borat and once again, America’s favorite fake Kazakhstani showed up to make everybody uncomfortable.
For those who missed the original, Borat is pure satire, ridiculing its targets on several levels. Sacha Baron Cohen plays title character Borat as the naïve, idiot product of a backwards country. In the world Borat reveals, Kazakhstan considers the wheel advanced technology, so on one level the joke is that Borat has a third-grade education and remains the pathetic product of a caveman-like chivalry as he takes his show to America where he embarrasses himself and those around him with his utter lack of refinement.
Ah, but there’s another, deeper level to this humor where Borat behaves like an idiot, yet shows shows anybody paying attention that “hey, what he’s doing isn’t far removed from things we actually do and the beliefs these we hold dear.” A perfect example comes up early when Borat –just released from hard prison labor- is introduced to his 15-year-old daughter, Tutar (Maria Bakalova). The joke is that all women in Kazakhstan are kept in cages, so when Borat comes the United States, he immediately searches and discovers a cage where he can keep his daughter. When Borat makes a comment about how Americans should be hip to this because we love keeping children in cages, we all understand the joke even though Borat is talking as if this a sensible thing to do.
Borat is on a mission in the United States to deliver a prize to America’s best womanizer, Mike Pence. See, Kazakhstan believes that Mike is such a lothario, he can’t even be left alone in the same room as a woman. :rimshot: And when the gift monkey doesn’t work out, Borat decides to present Mike his daughter to win the approval of his superiors. Obviously, it takes a certain mindset to appreciate the humor here. People who can’t see the lighter side of human trafficking or ladies man Mike Pence are probably not going to enjoy this film … and no one blames them. Personally, I thought the material was hilarious and long overdue.
I’m sure history will record this monster as the film that ruined Rudy Giuliani, but if we’re being honest, Rudy was tainted long before Borat came along. While Rudy is the biggest fish this film caught, Sacha Baron Cohen’s current roasting of America had little to do with Rudy the cousin-fucker and much more to do with a skewering of Americans we’d otherwise consider good were they not soulless trolls. The beauty of Borat Subsequent Moviefilm is found within the outward grace and inward horror 
of common Americans – the people in American life who wear the faces of angels, but react as though guided by the devil – it’s the friendly man who didn’t blink when selling Borat a cage to house his daughter; it’s the nice bakery lady who had no problem with decorating a cake to read “Jews will not replace us.” It’s the caring medical professional who wanted the best for Borat’s daughter, but upon mistakenly learning that she was carrying a child of incest wouldn’t even consider an abortion, concluding it was all part of “God’s plan.” It’s the good Samaritan who took a complete homeless stranger in, housed and fed him … and yet still felt the need to point out that Democrats were “worse than COVID” and that people like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton literally drink the blood of babies as part of some sort of vampiric death cult. I gotta ask -in all honesty, QAnon- isn’t it just a little bit convenient that your asinine conspiracy theory only calls opponents of Trump villains? There isn’t any Republican who participates in the baby-eating death cult? Because otherwise it seems based on sound logic and foolproof evidence. Morons. Dangerous morons.
These people were not difficult to find. Borat mostly found them in Texas, but they can be found all over the United States. There are literally millions of Americans who have somehow convinced themselves that top Dems kill and eat babies and that the cure to this menace is Donald Trump. There aren’t words to describe the stupid.
As I reflect upon Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, I really wonder what the equivalent skewering of liberal America looks like. And then I realize, well, it can’t be done. For one thing, no liberal actively talks about killing political rivals as we see 2nd amendment enthusiasts do in the film. For another, no one opposite Trump and Trumpists on the political spectrum holds an ounce of political power. Hmmm, what’s the opposite of fact-free neo-fascist Trumpism? Socialism, right? No socialist holds any political power here. What’s that? “Bernie?” “AOC?” HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!! That’s funny.
Oh, you’re serious. Well, ok. In that case, you need a quick poli-sci lesson. Socialism is a system where the government owns everything and allots according to need. Socialists don’t believe in private ownership. That doesn’t come close to describing Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Tt’s possible you might have this confused with social democracy, which is the form of government in places like Sweden, Finland, and Denmark … the places in the world where the people are happiest and live longest. These should be American goals, and they involve things like government ownership of health care, which makes zero sense as a for-profit institution (like we have in the United States).
For a ridiculous Borat-like character to come make fun of socialism, you’d have to have a populace completely wed to the idea of no personal ownership getting together to sing songs about how they’d like to put Mark Zuckerberg’s head on a platter … but first they’d make sure that he was no better off than anybody else.
No American who espouses such a thing has rat’s chance in a crazy cat lady apartment of being elected judge in a local bakeoff, much less a position of actual power. The conspiracy-clouded right, OTOH, has the president’s ear and helped run his campaign. And as of January 2021, I believe QAnon will even hold a seat in congress.
Borat Subsequent Moviefilm ain’t for the masses or the missus, but when it’s on, there’s no better satire of what clowns we Yanks have become than our reflection in the faux-Kazakhstan clown himself. I hate to say it, but at our current rate, we need a new Borat film every single week just to cover the idiocy from the Trump administration.
There once was a traveling man
Who was America’s #1 fan
I hate to interrupt
Could you find something less corrupt
Like, I dunno, say, Afghanistan?
Rated R, 95 Minutes
Director: Jason Wollner
Writer: Sacha Baron Cohen & Anthony Hines & Dan Swimer & Peter Baynham & Erica Rivinoja & Dan Mazer & Jena Friedman & Lee Kern
Genre: “This is really hard to watch…wait, it’s over?!”
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: People who have been waiting for Michael Moore to make this film
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: Trumpies
