Briefly: Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat has been hailed by many as the last refuge of shock humor, carrying on a tradition that included the likes of Lenny Bruce. But listening to any Lenny Bruce album–a joy in my mind, albeit an often times challenging one–there wasn’t any loathing for his subjects. When he would riff on, say, words that were incendiary (f–k, s–t, n—-r, etc.), Bruce did so because he was tired of all the crap people had to go through because some words were considered dirty, and some held the power to reduce a man, woman, or child into feeling like less than a human being. For all his faults, Lenny Bruce cared deeply about his audience, and the world he lived in.
Cohen shows no such concern in Borat, a film whose misanthropic tendencies soon grate after only a few minutes. If there’s a story it’s this: Borat comes to America to make a film for his homeland, falls in love with an image of Pam Anderson in Baywatch, and drives across the country, through the south, to find and marry her. Along the way, he gets to insult feminists, southern gentility, backwater rodeo fans, and, of course, Pam Anderson. If anything’s shocking, it’s the scene where Borat and his manager wrestle buck naked on a bed, and, to be honest, it’s disturbingly funny. But as for the rest of the film, it’s akin to, as I wrote in The Rake, throwing dynamite in a barrel of fish: southern bigots are just too easy. Would a bunch of New York liberals–like say, those that populated the Al Franken movie–have been welcoming to a man who offers his host of bag of feces and, later, a surprise visit from a black prostitute? Something tells me the answer is no, and that the results would be equally funny, but more damning. New York and L.A. emerge virtually unscathed, while frat boys, evangelical Christians, and the aforementioned rodeos and southerners get the skewer. And that’s just too damn easy.
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Death of a President, playing at the Oak Street, is a triumph of verisimilitude–that is, the filmmakers did a pretty damn good job of imagining the chaos and fear that would follow an assassination of George W. Bush. The problem isn’t that they get it right, it’s that they get it so right as to be tedious. They detail nearly every facet of this awful weekend in the future, including long shots of actual speeches and fictional foreign policy crises drains the life right out of the movie. Ask yourself: why would anyone want to listen to actual footage of Bush telling jokes about Chicago mayor Richard Daley, just because it’s been altered slightly to look as though it’s taking place in the future? We all know it’s not real, and a film like this needs to rise out of its context and include some actual hysteria (a woman who is one of Bush’s top speechwriters, and there with the First Lady when he dies, shows virtually no emotion), and maybe even humor, in order to get to the heart of what this would mean to us in real life. For a movie as controversial as Death of a President, it’s one of the least thought-provoking films you’ll find.
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