Starting from the notion that nothing's funnier than poor, ugly foreigners in cheap clothes, this phony documentary accompanies the derriere-fixated, woman-hating xenophobe reporter on a stateside trip to investigate Yank customs and culture. His rotund producer, Azamat (Ken Davitian), tags along, and the pair causes a stir at every stop: Borat insists on introducing himself to fellow New York City subway passengers with a peck on the cheek, for instance (before the hen in his suitcase gets loose), and, after buying a van and driving south, invites a prostitute to the home of a bourgeois couple throwing a dinner party in his honor (after asking his hostess where to dispose of a bag of his shit).
As on Cohen's Da Ali G Show, the subjects of these largely unscripted stealth-humor attacks—including, briefly, conservative loon Alan Keyes and siliconed has-been Pamela Anderson, with whom Borat becomes obsessed—have no idea that it's a put-on, and their varied reactions are what give the movie its disorienting depth. Roughly half fly off the handle (including, predictably, the Manhattanites), but the rest exhibit a tolerance that's revealing and even touching; some of the tarnish smeared on the American character by a race-baiting rodeo official is polished away by a chummy driving instructor and a tirelessly patient yard-sale matron. The effect is certain to confound ironists and cynics in the audience; indeed, the movie's brilliance lies in its subtle revelation that there's no place more foreign than the one in which we live.
Cohen's disarmingly cuddly persona and majestic recklessness carry the film, naturally, but director and former Seinfeld scribe Larry Charles brings a breeziness to the proceedings often lacking in the Ali G Show skits. And the essential illusion that we're watching a chintzy Third World doc is seamless thanks to the efforts of the editors (no fewer than three are credited) and the painstakingly cruddy-looking cinematography. Some of the material tanks despite the filmmakers' best efforts—few sparks fly when Borat meets with a group of feminists, for instance—but most, including the sequence in which Borat and Azamat have a long, partially public, nauseatingly revealing brawl, approach situationist sublimity.
Borat's Monty Python-esque reliance on working- and middle-class foils is its only real misstep; the corporate sociopaths and freeloading politicians who've made the U.S. so risible in the eyes of the world are clearly the more deserving targets. But only a self-important sourpuss would let that stand in the way of the laughs. In fact, those who find the film unfunny and insensitive will probably be just such prigs—more than willing to ridicule others but devoid of the insight required to laugh at themselves.