The Dictator

Beware the beard.

 With The Dictator, shock-jockeying actor-comedian Sasha Baron Cohen makes his first foray into the realm of scripted comedy.  Cohen scored a hit in 2006 with his ambitiously titled Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, in which he flounced around as a backwater third-world hick and shocked the consciences of unsuspecting middle-class Americans.  Satire came pretty naturally to that movie: all it had to do was put Borat in the same room as someone not in on the joke and watch.  The Dictator takes aim at some of the same topics, but in moving to a scripted format loses a bit of edge.

This time around, Cohen plays Admiral General Aladeen, supreme ruler of the fictional nation of Wadiya.  Aladeen is stupid, spoiled and, due to his country’s vast oil reserves, rich enough to do absolutely whatever he wants.  An early scene shows him competing in Wadiya’s answer to the Olympic Games, where he’s allowed to carry a gun and shoot athletes that threaten to outperform him.  These preliminary sections are a straight-forward send-up of real-world dictators like Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and North Korea’s Kim Jong-il (to whom The Dictator is dedicated) and provide the movie’s biggest laughs.

When Aladeen heads to New York City to address the United Nations, his advisors scheme to replace him with a dim-witted double.  Aladeen soon finds himself wandering the streets of Manhattan, bereft of his power and his beard, reduced to working as a grocer at a health food store run by Zoe (Anna Feris), an environmentally conscious, politically liberal feminist whom Aladeen begins to fall for despite their vast, vast cultural differences.  These things… a plot, a romance, an arc… are things that Cohen didn’t really use in his previous movies.  That’s not to say he’s now a slave to them; the script frequently whisks Aladeen away on madcap misadventures designed purely to get laughs, but the fact that they’re here at all makes The Dictator feel a touch more traditional than I had expected.

And considering his pedigree, I’m not sure that traditional is a good look for Cohen, at least not the kind of halfway-there traditional on display here.  Like Borat, The Dictator trades mainly in vulgar, barf-into-your-popcorn kind of gags.  Most of the ordinary bodily fluids get a good workout, and there are some choice lines about the value of female infants.  It’s strange to then watch Cohen shift gears and play the vulnerable rom-com lead in his scenes opposite Feris or toss off softball references to Eat, Pray, Love.  Maybe we’re catching Cohen in a transitional phase on his way to producing more ordinary multiplex fare, but if so the transition is a bit awkward.

In fact, even the outrageous bits don’t hit quite as hard as they should.  There’s one scene, for example, where Aladeen loses… something (I’ll let you find out the details yourself)… in a pregnant woman’s uterus.  We then get a view, surely the first of its kind, of the object from an insider’s perspective.  The joke keeps building from there, and it’s one of those moments when everyone in the theater lets out a collective groan, part delighted exasperation and part violent recoil, the likes of which Cohen was probably going for.  But even that joke is a little, dare I say, safe when compared to similar moments from Borat.  Even if it’s an inventive and no doubt dutifully prepared bit, it lacks the thrill of spontaneity that made the previous outing so popular.

One thing The Dictator does have going for it is its willingness to engage with material that’s relevant on a macro level in the world today, something beyond the merely personal stuff explored time and again by its contemporaries.  True, lampooning brutal dictatorships hardly amounts to making a controversial statement, but Cohen displays enough of an understanding of the mechanics behind dictatorships to ensure that his film actually has a point.  There’s a speech toward the end that draws a lot of comparisons between dictatorships and democracy, and while it’s all a bit on the nose I was glad to see the movie arrive somewhere.

The Dictator is a bit softer than Cohen’s earlier stuff, but I suppose he couldn’t have kept on making movies that lived on the precarious edge of bad taste forever.  If this flick truly does represent Cohen in transition, I hope he keeps going in that new direction.  He’s a smart guy and The Dictator is a smart movie, and I’d love to see what he could do with something not required to be so broad.