Latest Ali G (Sasha Baron Cohen) Film: ”Who Iz I?”

Review comments by Dr. Lloyd Sederer

As a movie reviewer, I receive film promotions and occasional invitations - usually to LA or NYC, both now distant from my home. Since these invites come without airline tickets and a room at the Beverly Hills Hotel, I have not been going.

But I continue to receive the film notices, often with a viewing link. As I did with the latest Sasha Baron Cohen film. This one is titled “Who Iz I”, with Cohen playing his outlandish character “Ali G”. He was, as well, the feature director of this film.

Cohen’s Ali G is a bizarrely dressed character often wearing hats twice the size of his head, aviator glasses from a hundred years ago, and puffy, wildly colored, oversized ski parkas sometimes reaching to his ankles. As scenes change, so does his attire, whose purpose defied my understanding, except as instrumental to his endeavors to be a clown.

But Ali G as a clown is on a glorified mission meant to cinematically reveal the vast foolhardiness of mankind. “Who Iz I”, is premised, in part, on his long-standing girlfriend, Julie (Morgana Robinson), becoming pregnant; Ali G neither wants to get married and certainly does not want to be a father.

Running parallel to the Julie narrative is Ali G’s hugely dated and worthless belief that HBO wants him to lead a new comedy show. He portrays how easily we believe in what we want, embodied by him and his fellow stable of actors, most not knowing that they are being played, not playing. These actors are everyday people who readily join him in his erroneous belief (among other fictions) that HBO wants him for a new comedy show.

Ali G proceeds to strip down his everyday film recruits (usually unaware of their being played), and a variety of everyday others, to their often embarrassingly ludicrous selves. His characters usually are not in on his intentions to reveal them as fools, as well as his efforts to reveal the hypocrisies of our culture.

In Ali G “Who Iz I” he snookers his recruits into joining him in a preposterous scheme, which they are innocent to. He must have recruited a small group of players for the film from a fractious group of men, who are given to serving a pseudo-Eastern European military, tyrannical-like leader that Ali G has found, dressed, and scripted to serve his purposes. These recruits are bursting with vile and hypocrisy, and eager to do harm to others who do not share in a heterosexual and misogynous world. They are not aware that Ali G is portraying them as fools.  Curiously, there are cameos by Newt Gingrich and George Santos, taken from other recordings, and not credited to this film.

Cohen’s first role, going back more than two decades, was of a white man who fancied himself as a hip-hop journalist and Black rapper, which led to a successful late 1990s UK satirical talk show. That start, the "Da Ali G Show," was a big hit in the U.K., which HBO made into a series of Cohen’s creations, and now has spawned the latest Ali G feature film, “Who Iz I”.

Some would recognize another of Sasha Cohen’s roles, one far more to my liking. He was Borat, the antisemitic (I am Jewish), seemingly mindless reporter from Kazakhstan extolling the grandeur of his country and doing hilarious hidden camera interviews. That work led to his funny and grand entrance touring America in 2006. He then recorded unscripted, hidden-camera interviews with people unaware of his intentions, who become the characters emerging in the narrative with Sasha Cohen, as they imagined him to be an idiotic and harmless foreigner. Their responses to his seemingly foolish questions revealed underlying prejudices and hypocrisies, which he would amplify with his pseudo-innocent, devious inquiries. But Cohen should have stopped with those productions and kept from the entering the world he mocks in this film.

Because: Ali G, in this film, has created a stage for parading and then mocking homosexuality, racism, misogyny, and xenophobia, to name a few of his big targets. Cohen must see this as a comedic approach to revealing the American prejudices that shame our country and too many of its citizens.

But I can say, as a psychiatrist, that shame is anathema to enabling those who see others as different and hateful (because of color, origin, sexual orientation, and gender), to recognize that we are in no way different, but rather all members of the very same human race. That would be a contribution towards burying prejudice, fear, and hate, and building a far better world, for all of us. But there is none of that in this film.

Comedy has power. It slips past our conventional defenses to reveal where and how we may have lost sight of what are the defining and worthy values of our lives and our country. Fundamental to the foundation values of the United States is the privilege of being citizens, where “All people are created equal”, and that they (we) are owed the rights of “...life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Not stopping there, the U.S. Declaration of Independence proclaimed that it is “...the main business of government to protect these rights.” Sadly, that has been lost, today, in fact, often seems more like trampled upon.

I would welcome if Sasha Baron Cohen took his comedic genius to the behaviors of ICE, the detention centers, and the ruinous disruption of families that the current US government Administration is perpetrating. And to the War with Iran, and the muscle-mania underway with Venezuela.

Comedic arrows shot into the heart of those atrocities would be blood worth shedding. Though it would come with the variety of the dangers from speaking out to oppression and injustice.

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Lloyd Sederer MD is a psychiatrist, public health doctor, and non-fiction writer.

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