It's not you Borat...it's us

The former Prime Minister Harold Wilson famously said that a week was a long time in politics. The last twelve months have also shown us that a year can feel like an eternity. So, what chance then of revisiting something fourteen years on and finding something fresh to say?

Kudos to Sacha Baron Cohen for at least trying in his latest Amazon offering Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, a sequel of sorts to his 2006 film Borat. Sadly, it seems that the effort is beyond him, but I also have to say that this is not entirely his fault. The world has moved on in fourteen years and not always for the better.

For those who have not seen either film Baron Cohen’s comic creation Borat Sagdiyev is Kazakhstan’s fourth most famous TV journalist. In the first film he comes to America to make a documentary on the country, this time round he is back trying to apologise. Specifically, he is delivering a bribe on behalf of his President to repair the damage done to his country’s reputation and encourage US leader ‘McDonald Trump’ to let him into his dictator’s club.

When the initial plan goes awry Borat comes up with an alternative. He will offer his 15-year-old daughter, Tutar, (Maria Bakalova) as an inducement to US Vide-President Mike Pence.

The problem facing the film is apparent right from the start. First time round Borat was a foreign nobody trading on the kindness – or at least tolerance – of strangers. But the first film was a huge international hit and now everyone knows Borat. The scene at the start where he is mobbed by fans is funny, especially since it is the mirror of the start of the first film, but it shows what he is up against.

Borat has to resort to pranking people who have never heard of him and they tend to be duller, less interesting, and – ironically - less deserving of humiliation. More to be pitied than scorned as my mother used to say. For their part, all of them seem to tolerate his antics with a weary ‘what fresh hell is this’ expression.

Similarly, what was shocking first time round seems normalised now. With a Chief Eexcutive who mocks the disabled and refuses to condemn QAnon the everyday bar is set pretty high, so the anti-Semitic baker, the borderline pervy cosmetic surgeon, and the conspiracy nuts just aren’t going to cut it. Baron Cohen is no longer a satirist, in these circumstances he has become a documentarian.

I suspect he may be aware of this since the film, which comes perilously close in places to running out of unscripted material, relies heavily on a scripted narrative between Borat and Tutar. This turns out to be its saving grace because newcomer Bakalova is the best thing in the film by some distance bringing an injection of much-needed energy and fun in places.

Of course, she features in the most talked about scene in which she interviews Trump confidante Rudy Giuliani. It is sleazy, creepy, and spectacularly ill-judged on his part but at the same time, given the people he clings to, more sad than shocking.

Technically the film is a great example of what can be done, even in the most difficult circumstances, with a little creativity and imagination. Frustratingly the last ten minutes shows a sharpness and comic invention which is missing from the rest of the film as Borat reimagines one of his greatest hits.  Some more of this incisiveness and less punching down might have made for a better film.

For me, in the end Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, misses more often than it hits but, as it says at the top, I think that’s down to us and not him.

 

Sorkin's magnificent seven shine in courtroom drama

 

If you had to pick a defining sequence for Aaron Sorkin’s work it would probably be the first eight minutes of the first episode of The Newsroom (2012). It’s the bit in which right-of-centre news anchor Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels) is lobbed a softball question at a college debate about why America is the greatest country in the world.

There is an interminable pause before he launches into an impassioned rant about what is wrong with the current state of affairs in his country and how different it used to be – ‘we made war on poverty, not the poor’, is a personal highlight. America is not the greatest country in the world, he says, but it sure as hell used to be.

This Damascene moment for McAvoy sets the tone for the series and crystallises Sorkin’s work. His reverence for the Greatest Generation knows no limits, it can be seen in this speech as well as in his biggest hit The West Wing (1999) which harks back to Kennedy’s Camelot. He can always find a moment in the past in which America was better. Which is why it is so shocking to see him come up empty handed in the comparison stakes with The Trial of the Chicago 7.

 Sorkin looks back at 1968 and he can find nothing but similarities with contemporary America, in a film which seems like one long cry of despair. There is rioting in the streets, people of colour are being shot and killed, the country seems poised on the brink of open revolt as a whole section of society decides it has had enough. This manifests itself in the titular trial with a series of egregious abuses of the legal system – defendants bound and gagged in a US courtroom, for example - which are played out on television every night.

This is dark, angry, ferocious stuff from Sorkin and this new bleak edge suits him. There isn’t that honeyed retrospection to save us here; this is where we were, he seems to be saying, and this is where we are again.

The Chicago 7, although for part of the trial there were eight of them, were a disparate group of radicals, activists, and protesters ranging from a Boy Scout leader to one of the founders of the Black Panthers. They were brought before the court on trumped up charges surrounding protests at the Democratic Party convention in Chicago in 1968 and faced sentences of 10 years in jail if convicted. The government is determined to get a conviction and the borderline corrupt but completely incompetent judge seems determined to do all he can to help.

Sorkin’s storytelling is superb. He weaves the narrative back and forth from the Convention to the trial with a deftness which makes the story completely compelling. He is telling a tale with at least a dozen principal characters and he does justice to them all.

Juggling all these stories is hard enough but Sorkin gives us nuance and insight too. The two clowns, as characterised by the establishment, were Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. But as played by Sacha Baron Cohen, Hoffman is a provocateur but a thoughtful one, Rubin (Jeremy Strong) meanwhile turns out to be a gentle romantic to provide some much needed light relief. Tom Hayden (Eddie Redmayne), who appears to be something of a stuffed shirt ends up giving the film its powerful moments.

There are showier performances too. Mark Rylance is superb as the gadfly lawyer William Kunstler, and Frank Langella is shockingly hateful as the judge. There is also a memorable cameo from Michael Keaton who is in that fortunate career purple patch where each new role is better than the one that preceded. He is plainly enjoying himself.

But even for all these wonderful individual moments this is first and foremost an ensemble piece and it is the craft of Sorkin’s direction, as well as his writing, that holds the film together. Those of us old enough to remember the trial recall the verdict but Sorkin still manages to develop a degree of suspense.

There is some doubt about whether the Oscars will take place this year. I am fairly certain of two things; the first is that the Academy Awards will go ahead in some form, the second is that, so far, The Trial of the Chicago 7 is the film to beat.