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 Very
few comedians have managed to bury themselves inside their creations as
deftly as Sacha Baron Cohen. The British actor first shot to notoriety
on television as Staines, England’s most famous resident, Ali G. In
full character, Baron Cohen would interview some of the day’s most
powerful political leaders and celebrities and the subjects’ bemusement
with the boneheaded hip-hop wannabe was recorded, often with very
embarrassing results. Cohen took the deep-cover formula further with
his naïve Eastern European immigrant, Borat, and flamboyant gay German
television host, Brüno. Each of his characters spawned a feature film,
with Borat and Brüno employing Baron Cohen’s television premise of
inserting the outrageous characters into real-life situations and
interacting with unsuspecting victims. With The Dictator, Baron Cohen
once again immerses himself into a character of questionable
intelligence, but steps out of the reality-based agit-comedy at which he
excels to give us the story of the rise and fall of a Middle Eastern
despot.
Long
has been the illustrious reign of Admiral General Aladeen. The
hereditary ruler of the oil-rich country of Wadiya has governed his
nation with an iron hand and reaped the rewards of a king. Cheering
crowds greet him wherever he goes -- or else. Aladeen’s enemies - and
often his friends - live in fear of even the most innocuous slight that
might bring on the fatal hand gesture that will end their lives. He can
buy practically anything his heart desires, even the intimate company of
the world’s biggest stars. He owns a truly prodigious beard that is his
pride and joy. He has an array of doubles to foil the many
assassination plots against him, thwarting any hope of a coup; his
latest doppelganger was pressed into service straight off a goat farm.
He even has his own Olympics, where he miraculously wins every event,
every time. Choked under his tight lead, Wadiya seems exempt from
any domino effect of the Arab Spring. One thing that evades Wadiya is
the approval of the United Nations, which is about to initiate sanctions
against the country when it’s (correctly) suspected that Aladeen
is fostering a nuclear weapons program. In order to claim innocence and
get back to bomb-making, the dictator, along with his trusted right-hand
man, his uncle Tamir, enter ‘the Devil’s Nest” of New York City for
Aladeen’s first visit to the West. All the security in place around the
Admiral General cannot protect him from an attack from close quarters.
A betrayal from within finds the leader shorn like a bearded Samson,
stripped of his identity and lost on the streets of Manhattan to fend
for himself. A kindly political protestor discovers Aladeen after he
starts a riot trying to reenter the U.N. to set matters straight. The
gender-neutral shopkeeper, Zoey, takes the foreigner under her wing,
totally unsuspecting that he is the very object of the demonstration.
While Aladeen must acclimate himself to the bizarre ways of the West,
back at the U.N., uncle Tamir has used the naïve double to promote a new
democracy in Wadiya, stripping Aladeen of his powers and opening the
country up for trade to hungry superpower nations that will pay Tamir
big money to dip into Wadiya’s oil fields. How can the leader lost in
the wilds of this debauched city find his way back to his precious
Wadiya to oppress and subjugate his people once more?
Sacha
Baron Cohen excels at showing the world its absurdity. There’s a lot of
material to cherry-pick from in the case of real Middle East dictators.
Taking every stereotype and throwing it at the audience, Baron Cohen’s
Aladeen is the very model of the excess, arrogance and utter contempt
for the West that we associated so closely with Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi
and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. In fact, the film’s inspiration was a book
about a kindly oligarch written by the late Iraqi leader. It isn’t only
Middle Eastern tyrants having the mickey taken out of them; Baron Cohen
takes aim at anti-Islamic racists and the overly-politically correct.
Aladeen’s employment at Zoey’s food cooperative in the middle of
hipster-ridden Brooklyn shows us his views on parental discipline and
his sympathy towards a pair of new parents unfortunate enough to give
birth to a baby girl. This being a Sacha Baron Cohen comedy, there’s no
such thing as a taboo or boundary or a thought to good taste, so of
course a lot of the humour is of over-the-top, ‘I can’t believe he went
there’ variety, with at least one exposed penis and the bizarre results
of the farmer double’s night with Aladeen’s voluptuous female
bodyguards.
In
sequences, the movie can be riotously funny. The scenes I mentioned, as
well as Aladeen’s helicopter ride with his fellow Wadiyan henchman where
a pair of tourists gets a very wrong idea about the swarthy men’s
intentions, are hilarious. Aladeen’s Wall of Shame, full of Polaroids
of paid sexual conquests culled from the highest echelons of Hollywood
is hysterical. What feels a bit off about The Dictator is that while
those moments are great, the film as a whole doesn’t quite gel together
and feels disjointed, like a group of loosely related skits. Some of
those skits work better than others, but as they are so separate the
film seems to rise or fall depending on how successful each vignette
is. The constant throughout is the all-in performance of Baron Cohen as
Admiral General Aladeen. The hallmark of Baron Cohen’s comedy is that
he never hedges, no matter how silly or outrageous or even physically
dangerous it might be to get the laugh. This was the case with Brüno’s
trip to Israel where he was chased by a mob of rabid rabbis, threatened
by a Palestinian terrorist and performed homosexual PDA in the middle of
an Arkansas MMA fighting cage for an arena full of blood-thirsty,
homophobic fans.
There’s nothing particularly life-threatening for
Baron Cohen in The Dictator, but he still commits to the role with the
same dedication. I only wish there had been more of a dangerous edge to
the film in terms of its satire; The Dictator opens plenty of
opportunities to hold up to ridicule the Western world’s recent
propensity toward war in the Middle East, as well as that region’s
resistance to change and modernisation. Baron Cohen also makes a couple
of well-deserved swipes at the West’s complicity in the torture of war
prisoners; the exact same behaviour that we used to deride dictators
like Aladeen for using. More of that kind of intelligent, scathing wit
and slightly less of the intentionally over-the-top physical comedy like
Aladeen’s realisation of love for Zoey as they hold hands inside a
birthing mother’s womb (shot from the baby’s POV) might’ve made
for a better balance.
When
compared to the excellent, ingenious Borat, or the outlandish Brüno, The
Dictator is definitely the lesser of these, but one should allow that
those previous two films are high standards to be measured by. The
Dictator’s timely material and Baron Cohen’s perceptive humour carry the
day, with the comedian’s fearlessness still evident if not as keenly
focused as it could be. Sacha Baron Cohen is still wonderfully
outrageous and The Dictator is good for more than its share of riotous
laughs.
~ The
Lady Miz Diva
May 10th,
2012
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