The Dictator – Farce. A Middle East potentate finds himself without a crown or a court in downtown Manahattan and musrt foil a plot for his double to take over his vile dictatorship and turn it into a vile democracy. Color 212.
★★★
It’s funny, but not funny enough, and looking at its star, Sasha Baron Cohen, that may be because he himself is not inherently funny. He does funny things, though, and he says funny things too. He has funny ideas. And his stories are far-fetched enough to make us ripe for a guffaw. For his purpose is to make us laugh – out of the other side of our faces, to be sure, but still…. Bert Lahr was inherently funny. So was Milton Berle, Fanny Brice, Jack Benny, Bob Hope, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Martha Raye, Carole Burnett, Billy Crystal, Walter Brennan, Lucille Ball, Donald Duck, John Lithgow, Judy Davis, Judy Garland. They had what is called funny bones. Bert Lahr was inherently funny; Jack Haley, Ray Bolger were not. But they could do funny things. And they could be vastly entertaining entertaining us. With Cohen the humor is mainly physical. It collects us by antics, get-ups, accents, impersonations, and complicated contradictions. All to the good. I will continue to visit his films because there is a natural defiance and an elegance and novelity of wit harbored in him that makes him belong up there dressed in a djellabah and a false beard and a screwy accent, and ignorant of his own folly all the time. I would not care to see him play a comedy by Shaw. But this? yes. For there is a giddiness in his breast that wants to roughride and that is worth witnessing for its own sake, and that is what really makes him a star. Enthusiasm for what he is doing. It’s not as common as one might suppose. Brad Pitt has it. So does Tom Cruise. To be present with it is just plain good for one’s digestion.