ON SACHA BARON COHEN’S NEW MOVIE: NATHAN BURSTEIN
http://www.timesofisrael.com/worth-submitting-to-this-dictator/
Worth submitting to this ‘Dictator’ Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest film, now playing in the US, offers an extra layer of jokes for viewers with knowledge about the Middle East
One of the more disingenuous claims you’re likely to see this year arrives during the final credits of “The Dictator,” in which Paramount Pictures declares that any resemblance between the film and real life is purely coincidental.
The claim is preposterous, of course, as anyone who’s seen a trailer can attest. Sacha Baron Cohen’s title character, the ruler of a made-up country called Wadiya, is a transparent hybrid of despots from the Muslim world — a tyrant who dresses like Muammar Ghadafi, approaches sports like one of Saddam Hussein’s sons, and enjoys the same grotesquely extravagant lifestyle as a Saudi prince. The similarities are the entire point of the film.
That absurd disclaimer aside, “The Dictator” is a jauntily amusing ride. Although a backlash against Baron Cohen has started to emerge in some quarters, the film reconfirms its star’s comic bona fides, delivering a largely successful stream of satire in its concise 83 minutes. Some Arab-Americans have protested the film’s portrayal of their Middle Eastern counterparts, and Jewish viewers may squirm during a scene involving a video game based on the terrorist massacre of Israelis at the Olympics. Many of the jokes aren’t terribly ambitious – figures like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Kim Jong-il (the film is dedicated to the latter) practically write the punchlines themselves.
But those deficiencies aside, the movie also offers plenty of positives, staying short and sweet and cramming in lots of sharp-eyed gags. As in “Borat,” Baron Cohen’s most successful comedy, the story begins in the protagonist’s homeland, where the title character — Admiral General Aladeen — finds himself under growing international pressure because of his nuclear weapons program. (The weapons “will certainly never be used to attack Is–,” he declares at a press conference, giggling at his own dishonesty. “Oh boy.”) As in the earlier film, the plot contrives to bring our antihero to the United States, where he and the natives marvel at one another’s odd customs, and unwittingly unveil their own hypocrisies.
Most of these exchanges take place in the company of the well-meaning Zoey (Anna Faris), a political activist from Brooklyn who works at an organic food coop. (Her store, the kind of place where a real-life anti-Israel boycott was considered this year, embraces people “of all genders, and of no gender,” she brags obliviously.) By the time the pair meet, General Aladeen has been ousted in a secret coup, replaced by a body double under the command of his traitorous deputy (Ben Kingsley). For their own reasons, both the deposed dictator and his love interest conspire to attend a planned press conference near the UN, where Aladeen’s doppelganger is scheduled to announce Wadiya’s transition to democracy.
Baron Cohen and his writing team began work on “The Dictator” before the Arab Spring, which has inevitably stolen a bit of the movie’s thunder. Many of the jokes would have seemed riskier, and had a sharper bite, before the revolutions. But given the horrifying news that continues to pour out of the region, there’s still something oddly cathartic about laughing at the unapologetic misogyny, Jew hatred and barbarism that is, one hopes, finally making its historic exit.
For those with a little knowledge of the Middle East, “The Dictator“ offers an extra layer of jokes: One scene features Baron Cohen speaking a garbled but recognizable form of Hebrew — ostensibly his character’s native language — while in another, he mocks an old set of torture instruments by asking, “Where did you get those relics? The shah of Iran’s garage sale?”
Hebrew and Yiddish pop up regularly during the film’s inevitable jokes about bodily functions, and the names of two Yemenite Jewish delicacies get dropped as well. (As on “Saturday Night Live,” the word “jachnun” is used as a greeting, while the dictator repeatedly employs “malawach” to refer to part of the female anatomy.)
Lest the movie be accused of simply bullying dark-skinned Middle Easterners, “The Dictator” also trains its lens on the West, sending up the sort of intellectual laziness that allows people to casually describe the police as “fascists.” Those on the right won’t be any more pleased by one monologue, painful because it’s true, about the obscene disparities in wealth that are making a farce of the American dream.
Less obvious but more impressive, however, is the film’s repeated mockery of China, which has used its growing movie market to bully Hollywood into neutering other projects. Whatever got left on the cutting-room floor, good for Baron Cohen and Paramount for not giving in so easily.
It’s hard, watching the movie, not to be reminded of a similarly titled film – Charlie Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator,” in which another case of switched identities sets up jokes about a vicious tyrant. Chaplin later regretted his send-up of Hitler, saying he wouldn’t have joked about the Nazi leader had he known where Europe was headed. (The film came out in 1940.)
Watching it now is to be struck by the idea that Hitler could ever have seemed funny – and by the poignant speech Chaplin gives at the end.
Seventy years later, as Iran continues its push for nuclear weapons, one can only hope Baron Cohen’s dictator won’t eventually be viewed the same way.
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