Benign Tyranny

For a decade, Sacha Baron Cohen reveled in his role as the shockmeister of comedy. The characters he hatched on British TV–belligerent “voice of da yoof” Ali G, Kazakh journalist Borat Sagdiyev and gay Austrian fashionista Brno–turned interviews into outrage, sandbagging politicians with rudely pertinent questions and ordinary folks with his confrontational antics. From these characters came three films: Ali G Indahouse (2002) and the prime mockumentaries Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006) and Brno (2009). Borat was a worldwide hit, Brno not so much, indicating that audiences may have been feeling some kamikaze-comedy fatigue.

Any shock treatment–whether by electrodes, waterboarding or (in Brno’s case) propositioning some good ol’ Southern boys on a camping trip–eventually loses its urgent impact, especially when moviegoers, familiar with an artist’s strategies, can steel themselves for his next assault. So in The Dictator, Baron Cohen tries shocking his fans by being not so very shocking. Still wielding his satire with a coroner’s scalpel, he fully earns his latest R rating with a point-of-view scene of a hand fishing for a cell phone inside a pregnant woman’s vagina. But the vibe of this scripted, infernally funny comedy is more Monty Python than Ali G; it’s kinder, if not gentler. The movie’s dirtiest secret is that it’s also a love story.

Renouncing the ambush tactics of Borat and Brno, Baron Cohen creates his first new character in a decade: Admiral General Aladeen, the extravagantly bearded despot of the North African nation of Wadiya. A crackpot mlange of tyrants from Kim Jong Il (to whose “loving memory” the film is dedicated) to Muammar Gaddafi, Aladeen gets deposed by his second in command (Ben Kingsley) and replaced with an idiot double (also Baron Cohen). The real dictator shaves his beard and travels incognito to New York City, where the double is to announce a change of Wadiyan policy at the U.N.

Does the story sound familiar? It should; its indirect source is Mark Twain’s 1881 The Prince and the Pauper, sire of a zillion double-identity books and movies. The twist engineered by Baron Cohen, his three fellow writers and director Larry Charles is to toss the shaven Aladeen into gentrified Brooklyn, where Wadiyan dissidents mingle with the lefties who run a local food co-op. There he takes a job under the solemnly socialist tutelage of Zoe (Scary Movie survivor Anna Faris), who sports underarm hair as luxuriant as Aladeen’s former beard and believes in every dogma he abhors. Cue the impossible, inevitable romance.

Beneath its killer jokes about torture devices and Osama bin Laden–who, Aladeen confides, “has been staying in my guest house ever since they shot his double last year”–The Dictator is a comedy that wouldn’t mind being loved. Through its cracked but rosy prism, we can see the connection of all Baron Cohen’s characters to the tradition of movie-comedy anarchy, from the silent buffoon Harry Langdon to the Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges and, in milder form, to Jerry Lewis, Jim Carrey and Adam Sandler. All are innocents who never got the memo about acting grown up. Baron Cohen simply gives this infantile ignorance a foreign accent and unleashes it in the U.S. He holds up a fun-house mirror to the country’s prejudices and suggests, at the end, that America has dictators too.

Fans of the nasty Baron Cohen may regret his being borderline nice in The Dictator. But we should welcome his decision to stop being the best at something few others dare try and instead to inhabit a more familiar comedy style–just going denser, wilder, better. He pulls it off.