We have met Borat, and he is us

I'm going to recommend that you go see Borat. It's vulgar, filthy and crude, but it's also shrewd, subtle and subversive. It's anarchic in the Marx Brothers tradition. Sacha Baron Cohen is a very funny guy and completely outrageous.

The setup for Borat, the film, is relatively simple. Borat, a Kazakh TV journalist, is funded marginally to travel to the United States, to bring back footage of America, through which Kazakhstan will enrich its own culture. Targeting mostly red state culture, Borat shows Americans to be as misogynist, racist, immoral and perverse as his countrymen. There is great physical comedy. There is some very good writing. There are scenes that stunned me: Borat's rebirth in a fundamentalist church; partying with some South Carolina frat boys in an RV; interviewing a group of first generation feminists; taking a driving lesson. I felt embarrassed for the people in the setups, but they were just being themselves after all.

Now that Borat is box-office gold, people are crawling out of the woodwork and lawyering up. The frat boys are claiming to have been duped. Some guy from Turkey is claiming that Borat is based on him; he wants to sue and, yes, make his own movie. Kazakhstan itself is none too pleased.

I'm sure that the nastiest and most tasteless moments will be the ones that get the most attention. It's the rest of the movie, though, that is the most provocative, and it holds the key to what Cohen is saying.