* * The
Dictator. Written by Sacha Baron Cohen, Alec Berg, David Mandel & Jeff
Schaffer. Directed by Larry Charles.
 |
| Admiral-General Aladeen and entourage in The Dictator. |
If you dare, feel sorry for poor Sacha Noam Baron Cohen. Not too long ago, he had a whole satiric niche to himself, in which he would present himself to ordinary folks and celebrities in the guise of one of his outrageous "alter egos" (Ali G, Borat, Brüno). His characters were invariably racist, sexist, anti-Semitic pigs, and the unscripted reactions he drew from the haters said volumes about them. Living somewhere in the twilight zone between reality TV and political comedy, Cohen's stuff was edge and funny as hell--especially in the small, punchy does he served up on British TV in Da Ali G Show.
Unfortunately, then success happened. Nearly everybody
got hip to Cohen's shtick after his surprise hit feature Borat: Cultural Learnings of
America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, and most of the
rest after his less-successful follow-up, Brüno.
Getting even half-drunk frat boys to expose their foolishness on camera is
impossible now, let alone baiting public figures like Pat Buchanan or Ron Paul
(whom Cohen got alone in a hotel room for Brüno). Since then he's done small supporting roles--as in playing
a character in a scripted story--in such films as Talladega Nights, Sweeney
Todd, and Hugo. But Cohen as an
ordinary comedic actor isn't half as fun as that other guy, the provocateur who
once satirized Islamo-misogyny by boasting he got his Kazakh wife by trading
her for a can of gas.
Cohen's The
Dictator is his first feature since becoming too recognizable to be good.
Rumored to be a very loose adaptation of a novel by Saddam Hussein, it features
Cohen as "General Admiral Aladeen", the strong-man of the fictional
North African nation of Wadiya. The fright-bearded Aladeen is caricature, but
only just: an amusing scene where he swears his rogue nation only wants
"peaceful nuclear power", but can't keep a straight face while saying
it, seems not so far-fetched given the taste for drama of rulers like
Ahmadinejad, Gaddafi, and Chavez. Yet there's an air of discomfort in Cohen's
wholly scripted comedy. When we watch Aladeen in his palace playing what
appears to be an anti-Zionist shooter game (including a Wii-enabled beheading
sword and a late-night visit to the Israeli Olympic team), the joke comes off
as more funny in principle than in fact.
The rest of the story, wherein the shaved and
unrecognized Aladeen is cut adrift in New York City by his duplicitous general
(Ben Kingsley) is hit or miss. Forced to engage in normal human interactions
for the first time, the dictator ends up befriending the fervently sustainable
manager of a Brooklyn food co-op (Anna Faris). Despite his taste for kicking
small kids and slapping impertinent customers, Aladeen soon proves he can make
the trains run on time, putting the coop’s Jew in charge of the cash register
and the "sub-Saharan" on stock-boy duty.
The Dictator is
rude, but it’s still conventional to a fault. Like Borat and Bruno in their
trips through America, the haplessly hateful dictator is supposed to be an
x-ray through the chest of American culture, revealing what is busy metastasizing
in there. Trouble is, the ignorance being satirized here is just pretend, while
real hate, with all its gleaming, wild-eyed fascination, is all too easy to find.
(As of this writing a YouTube video has gone viral of a North Carolina Baptist preacher,
calling from the pulpit for gays and lesbians to be put in concentration camps
until they "die out.”) Compared to shock value of the real thing, Cohen
and his three co-screenwriters simply can't compete.
Given the premise, it's hard to believe Cohen and director
Larry Charles didn't have in mind Charlie Chaplin's classic The Great Dictator (1940). Chaplin, as
he tried to deflate fascism through satire, never stopped being a Victorian
sentimentalist. Channeling his basic optimism in human nature through dictator
"Adenoid Hynkel's" final speech, he presented a stem-winding oration
on the virtue of peace and the basic dignity of all peoples--in short, exactly
the kind of thing the real Adolf Hitler would never say.
Cohen and Charles punctuate The Dictator with a speech too--but they make a different choice.
Instead of affirmation, they opt for sarcasm, suggesting that America must
stand for freedom because she "never, ever" tolerates starting wars
based on lies, unlawful detentions, or rigged elections. In short, he suggests
there’s some moral equivalency between the U.S. and, say, the Islamic Republic
of Iran. It’s the kind of wise-ass cynicism we see everywhere these days, from
people who prefer to sound smart than make a constructive difference.
Indeed, there's more than a hint of romantic
authoritarianism in The Dictator, as
when Aladeen proves he can run the store better than the do-gooder lefties that
loathe him. Laughing at dictators can be subversive--but it can also be the
first step toward identifying with them. Given the choice between corrupt,
inept democracy and honest-to-goodness
tyranny, The Dictator prefer to keep
its options open.
© 2012 Nicholas Nicastro
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