Borat Review

The stunt is famous and the discipline behind it is what deserves the credit. Sacha Baron Cohen holds a character through hours of unscripted encounters with people who never consented to a comedy, and the technique stays consistent: be warm, be foreign, agree with everything, and let the other person fill the silence. When it works, as it does at the rodeo and at a dinner party in the American South, the film is not making fun of anybody.

It is recording. The scripted frame built around those encounters, the road trip and the pursuit of a television actress, is thin and occasionally desperate, and the Kazakhstan material at either end is a broad cartoon that sits oddly against the documentary footage. Larry Charles shoots it deliberately ugly, in the flat video grammar of a travel program, which is the right call. The ethics are genuinely arguable and the film has never fully answered for how some of its subjects were treated. But nothing else has captured this much of a country by simply being polite and waiting.